Noise and voice

The world is too much noisy.

I am not talking about the horns on the road, or someone shouting  or any other noise created due to sound waves. Today we are suffering from another kind of noise. One of information.

There is too much information on the internet. So much that smart Google engineers have been working over the years to organise it and yet Google is not the only source of information. We are drowning in the feedback of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and what not. Every couple of minutes, someone would message you on WhatsApp and your email is overflowing with unread emails. Mailing lists that you had subscribed to years ago is still sending you emails. You don’t unsubscribe because you are hoping that you would get that one interesting email which would teach you something interesting and valuable. Thank god for such a big inbox Gmail!

There is so much information all around us and very little wisdom.

Sometimes I remember my childhood when I would play cricket for hours on end, go on a walk without a cell phone and visit my relatives who did not have their face stuck into a smartphone and miss the era of pure human connection. I have also become much more prone to distraction over the years. I miss my virtual life on Facebook when I don’t visit the website for too long. I am sure that if I don’t post anything there for a month, not one person would notice. But in the old era, if I did not go to play cricket for one week, one of my friends would drop by home to enquire about me. There was some human connection in that relationship.

I want that personal connection back. That experience back and that voice back. The voice of blabber, the voice of endless jokes where critical analysis and paralysis was not suffocating people.

I don’t want to be in touch with people who have “status updates”.

I want to connect with people who have voice. People who know who they authentically are. Not people who want to showcase a personality so that they would be seen favourably by others on a social network.

Drowning in noise, I don’t want this!

I need a photo drone for future travels

I have been writing about my past travels and it just hit me that there were lots of beautiful places that I have visited and I would have loved to post the photos of them but I don’t have them!

I don’t have the photos because I like to live in the moment and I hate the act of taking pictures while traveling because it removes me from my primary objective of traveling which is : being in the moment and enjoying everything.

I have also seen many people who seem to enjoy photography while traveling but I don’t envy them. Because I see that they miss many small but beautiful details because they are too busy behind the camera lens. I even hate it when people pose for around 20 photos in same posture at the same place because they “want to post it on Facebook”.

Even then, I would like to have the photos of my travel – I don’t want to be the one snapping them though. So here is the solution that I have in my mind-

A camera drone-

• It should recognise when I am standing with my fellow travelers and smiling – maybe it can have a voice command. “CameraX please take a photo of my group”
• Randomly take snapshots when people are smiling or laughing
• Recognise moments such as – cutting of a cake, raising of toasts etc. and take snaps at those moments
• Take photos from my viewpoint – for example if I am watching the waves on the beach. It can take the photo of the beach and say – “Neeraj’s view beach at Goa, India”

It can have some more features but these are the ones which would suffice for me. I think some companies are already building similar cameras, I just wish I would have one such camera soon to document all my future travels with losing the sight of the moment.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

• Arthur C Clarke