The Evolutionary Quest for a Slender Finger

No, that was not a typo. I didn’t mean slender figure…

 

Before I clarify further, I need to take you on a minor Darwinian detour to get into the skin of this thing called evolution. Since Man first came to be on earth, he has been continuously evolving in keeping with the times. For instance teeth and jaws have shrunk as vegetarian diets proliferate. Light skin and blue eyes came about in places with less sunlight exposure. Brains enlarged to cope with the increasing complexity of making decisions from a multitude of choices, for example which OTT series to watch next, notwithstanding the fact that you would probably go back in the end to re-bingeing on Brooklyn 99 or The Office…

 

But here’s the nub - most of these changes were forced upon us by nature and were not man made, meaning we could go about the process of evolving at a glacial pace that sometimes spanned millennia. The technology era is however imposing a huge challenge on the need to dramatically speed things up. Will humanity be able to cope? How can we suddenly up our game and dramatically accelerate the the evolutionary process? 

 

You may be a little bemused at my disquiet. Why do we need to evolve rapidly, you may wonder. Is it the AI revolution I’m alluding to? And where do slender fingers enter the equation? Stay with me while I walk you through the precarious situation that you’re already in and probably haven’t quite realized yet. 

 

If you are an “abbreviation person”, phrases like LOL, ROFL, OMW are probably part of your active lexicon. But I find it incomprehensible that the one thing that we need to say most often has not yet been abbreviated by humans. I am talking about DBM. Or its cousin, DBE. Dialled by Mistake. Or by Error. 

 

Think about it. How often, when you finish a call and then casually swipe the screen to close it, has your clumsy finger accidentally triggered another call? Or you want to select a number from a list on the touch screen, but your index finger inadvertently selects the adjacent one and you don’t even realize it sometimes till the strange voice on the phone jolts you into facing up to the fact that you had DBMed…

 

And don’t get me going on how frequently I see a whatsapp group call being initiated by some poor soul whose fingers seem to have a mind of their own? Infact, have you ever seen a bonafide whatsapp group call? It’s almost always a case of DBM. 

 

Lest you run away with the superficial insight that this is about wrong calls, I would urge you to stay and hear the whole of it. I next point to the phenomenon of the 2 second voice note in whatsapp groups! Clearly triggered by some errant finger pressing on the mic button unintentionally. The note, if you’re lucky, will probably be blank, but it could just as easily trigger world war 3 if you were verbally indiscreet during those two seconds when your finger was playing the dirty on you. The worst case scenario here is of course when you suddenly notice on your phone screen that a call is actually in progress for the last 40 seconds, thanks to your errant finger having dialled your boss…

 

In the good old days of the manual typewriter, there was so much space between the keys that I even remember my fingers getting stuck in between keys while typing! In the relentless thrust of miniaturization, the keypad became progressively smaller as we graduated to PCs, then laptops. Now with the mobile phone, we have hit rock bottom, with the keypad being compressed into such a small area that the average button area is 0.5 square cm (source : the omniscient ChatGPT). The same Omniscient One also tells me that the average thumb area which is in contact with a mobile phone button is 1.5 square cm. That’s 3 times the button area!!! So mathematically speaking, there is always a 66% chance you don’t press the right button! 

 

What really drives me up the wall are some of these evil websites that I get directed to. You land on their page unsuspectingly, but soon enough there are a bunch of pop ups containing ads, cookie notifications and the like. To read or see what you primarily wanted to, you have to go through the excruciating step of closing each of these popups by pressing a microscopic “close” button which will typically be 0.01 sq cm in area, with your 1.5 sq cm sized thumb! To make things interesting, this has to be sometimes achieved while the page is loading jerkily, making the already miniscule bulls eye a moving target on top of it! I never get it right, and sure enough, the next thing I know is that I’m being asked to confirm the payment mode for an annual subscription to some random service. 

 

Make no mistake. Finger obesity is rapidly becoming the next health epidemic. I am sure, over generations, our fingers will slowly adapt and evolve into slim, reed like structures, but this transition is simply not going to keep pace with that of technology’s relentless and rapid march towards miniaturization. 

 

Mankind, having obsessed about hearts, brains, livers and even kidneys, is waking up sheepishly to the fact that it had collectively taken this appendage rather for granted. That the size and shape of our fingers would play any role at all in our lives has been a rude surprise. Take my dad, for instance; slim and dapper for his age, he has an unusual handicap. He has stub-like thumbs, completely out of proportion to his frame. The number of times he DBMs me or my siblings is legendary in family circles. It’s actually a miracle that he has not yet been snared into supporting some large Nigerian family’s lifetime expenses on account of his uncontainable thumb.

 

People of my vintage marvel at how even very young kids are seemingly so adept at the mobile, displaying no discomfiture whatsoever. For simplistic minds, this constitutes a paradox, whereas I present it as living evidence of my theory. Just give them time. Let their tender bodies and thus the fingers grow larger and we’ll then see how they start fumbling…

 

Let’s face it, we are helplessly caught between the mismatch of the rapid speed of technological disruption and the more unhurried and generational evolution of nature. Probably not going to happen in my lifetime. But being an eternal optimist, I googled “exercise for slender fingers”, and was absolutely thrilled to get about 17 million hits! After much tortuous navigation of these websites though, I figured out that the top two suggestions were “avoiding sodium” and “drinking lots of water”. Clearly, not the beginning of the solution that I’d hoped for, more a dead end… 

 

There it is, then. Chances are, till we evolve into lean-fingered versions of the homo sapien species, we are doomed to miscommunicate whenever we set out to type words, that much is clear. The only upside of this is that the wide prevalence of this problem makes it a very credible excuse even when you type exactly what you wanted to, but feel it politically wise to retract. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it – I typed (or dialled, or pressed) by mistake” has the potential to be a very valid get-out-of-jail-free card whenever you want to get out of a tricky spot. I would go as far to say that in the all-time list of undebatable excuses, this one can occupy the top spot, in the process dislodging the latecomer’s legendary “sorry, Mumbai traffic, you know…”.

 

*****

Proof of Life

The whole thing started when my daughter, post a retro music event, remarked that the music piece played at the beginning was kind of catchy in a cute, quaint way… 

 

That’s all the opening I needed. I explained to her that it was the title music of a movie called Sholay that was released almost 50 years ago. With evangelist zeal, I suggested we catch it together on OTT, as it had been almost five years since I had last watched it for the 23^rd time, only to have suggestion summarily scorched…

 

That cut me to the quick. You see, for many of my vintage, responsible parenting comprises inculcating habits like good table manners, making the bed and being respectable to elders; watching Sholay would comfortably qualify to be part of this list. I realized I had been remiss… 

 

That was the mission then, should I choose to accept it. Make her watch Sholay. End to end…

 

Of course, in an endeavour like this, proper planning and foundation laying are essential. Step one was cunningly suggesting to her that we should make it a thing to watch movies on OTT together now and then. This was received with some initial suspicion, but eventually we got the ball rolling. To begin with, I had to yield to her choices to conceal the true purpose of the entire scheme. So I suffered through a ton load of tripe like Beast, Retro and even Pathan. Pure agony! But I soldiered on with nary a protest. 

 

Eventually, after demonstrating adequate commitment to the dad-daughter bonding exercise, it was my turn to pick. I won’t bore you with the details, but I had to really work at getting Sholay into the playlist. A combination of emotional blackmail, sulking and when nothing worked, some ungainly begging got things to the point finally where we settled down to watch Sholay, popcorn in hand. The popcorn was my touch, I was leaving nothing to chance here.

 

It was an excruciatingly hard journey. All the calls that my daughter would ruthlessly ignore during Leo and Retro were suddenly calls of critical import! The first 20 minutes were so stop and start, she kept losing the thread. About half an hour into the movie she just walked off claiming she had work to do and maybe we could watch it the next day…

 

I was a disturbed man that night. Couldn’t sleep. What does this say about my daughter’s character, was the thought running feverishly through my mind as I tossed and turned. Is she the kind of person who would not like Sholay? Where did we go so wrong in her upbringing. I confided in my wife over coffee the next day, but was rather disappointed with her lack of reaction. Her casual remark , “so what if she doesn’t like it”, was a rude reminder to me that she herself had seen Sholay only twice. Sometimes I wish I had popped this question to her early during our courtship, but anyway, that ship has sailed… I realized with a despairing heart that I was alone in this quest. 

 

Not the kind to give up easily, I confronted my daughter over dinner the next day on her abrupt walk-out. After some tenacious pushing and prodding I got to the root of the issue. Apparently, she found the film very patriarchal. She couldn’t understand why Jaya Bhaduri had to be such a sad character dressed in all white just because her husband had died. That Basanti had to be a stereotypical female chatterbox was deeply offensive to her gender sensibilities. Ironically, all through her diatribe, I’m sitting there unable to get in a word sideways…

 

Out of sheer despair, I decided to go all in. A weekend trip to Pondy if we watched it to the end. I know, shameless bribing, and I’m not proud of the example I was setting, but sometimes, the means are a distant second to the end, especially when the end is so noble…

 

So off we went again. In about 30 – 40 minutes of watching another of her important calls came up. Apparently it was going to be a long call so she called close of play. But by this time, Gabbar had had a chance to show up on screen, more Sholay things had happened. I was not certain, but something seemed to suggest that the filmmaking was beginning to make a dent on her defenses. 

 

That night, I was still disturbed, but for the first time since I undertook the mission, I detected a glimmer of hope. Not wanting to get lulled into a sense of false security, I lay awake into the wee hours of the morning, meticulously formulating my further course of action. 

 

The next few days, I didn’t explicitly mention the movie, but kept dropping some hints of about beaches and sunsets. Unfortunately, it seemed like it was falling on deaf ears. Or was I being too subtle? My heart was sinking again. How did this happen? I found myself critically examining her early childhood to figure out how this situation had come about. Was it that time when she, at the tender age of two, fell off the cot head first on the floor? Was it in her seventh year, when she was chased by a bunch of stray dogs and was so traumatized that she became a lifelong cynophobe? 

 

In the meantime, we had gone back to binge watching Brooklyn 99 and The Office. Hope had died a tragic death. And then one day, magically, she mentioned that we might as well finish watching Sholay. Moving like greased lightning, I booted up the movie and we settled down again. 

 

By now, Gabbar was doing his thing, Amitabh was being all tall and sardonic, Thakur’s grippingly tragic back story was laid bare for all to see. Mehbooba landed with a thunderous impact. As is my wont whenever I watch Sholay, I do a parallel delivery of every dialogue of every character. While earlier, she had tolerated this with a roll of her eyes, now she was actually shushing me. Bliss!

 

The rest of the way to the end was super smooth but it was her glowing closing comments that were sending me into raptures. I compiled a brief mental checklist and ran through it.

 

Did she cry when Jai died? Check.

Did she start randomly saying “arre o samba”, for instance when she wanted a second helping of sambhar during breakfast? Check.

Did she ask indignantly why there was no Sholay 2? Check.

Did she talk about wanting to visit Ramnagara near Bangalore sometime in life? Check.

 

Her reaction to each element of the movie was all that a parent could have asked for, leaving me quite mortified at my needless self flagellation. She liked Sholay! Her heart is in the right place. The sun shone through. Surely now she would go on to become a fine and upstanding adult who would contribute her bit to the world. 

 

In fact, expanding the boundaries of this point a bit, I would suggest we make this the ultimate test of proof of character, nay, of life itself. Seriously, corporates should do away with expensive psychometric tests like Myers-Briggs and just ask the question that matters : “Did you like Sholay?”. If the answer is “No”, you know you need to delve deeper into the darkness that lurks somewhere deep within the unfortunate soul. 

 

Or take the case of the overrated captcha. Recently, I was finding a particular captcha so indecipherable that I had to, in what could be called the supreme irony, take ChatGPT’s help to decode it. Maybe the way forward is to replace captcha with the same eternal question – “Do you like Sholay?”. And if the answer is negative, block, block, block. It’s almost certainly a robot. Or a warm body with a black heart. Either way it doesn’t deserve access…

 

India vs England : The true man of the series

OK, the hysteria behind Siraj is probably justified. Shortly, as the intoxication wears off, the pundits will hasten to claim that this is a team game and that this victory belongs to the whole team. Hell, some of them would even rush to credit the people who worked behind the scenes like the team masseur, the backup coaching staff and so on. True, they do deserve some credit. But the real casualty in all this euphoria is that the one person who worked tirelessly for the victory will continue to be unrecognized and hence, unsung. Who, you ask? Well, not to crow about it, but with all the humility at my disposal, I put up my hand as the unsung one.

 

Any lay cricket enthusiast will only know that Siraj bowled a good yorker and got Atkinson. Most Indian fans, in their utter naivety, will probably attribute it to various factors like Siraj’s fighting qualities, his never say die spirit and the like. Little do they know…

 

Seasoned sports writers will dissect the match, every session and indeed, the whole series. The sad thing is my contribution in the whole episode is not going to be recognized by anyone – not even my near and dear ones.

 

Take the critical first session of day 5. For the first over, I sat cross legged on my bed, not moving an inch, forcing myself to have an ever so small sip of water almost metronomically after every delivery by Prasidh, with my mobile phone face down to my left and at a right angle to my A/C remote and generally did all the other things that I knew would send the right energy to the Oval. But it didn’t quite work with England scoring 8 runs off the over. It was going to end very soon unless I nimbly changed my approach. For the next over, I moved to the living room and watched the match with the A/C at a setting of 24^oC and the fan at medium speed. Bingo! Siraj struck right away! Jamie Smith was history. 3 more to go…

 

Gratifyingly, a couple more overs down, the 8^th wicket went. And then, a slight drizzle. That was not good. I had to ensure that the rain didn’t pick up to the point where the match had to be suspended, even while guiding the course of the match. Much like Spiderman (the Toby one) who had to hold the cable with a hand to prevent MJ from falling down while fighting the Green Goblin with the other. 

 

This clearly called for another quick shift in strategy, leading me to watch the rest of the match on my mobile sitting in the balcony, facing the direction of the Oval (roughly 32^o North of East from where I sat). And shortly thereafter, and quite inevitably, the fat lady had sung! 

 

But before you run away with some simplistic take-out, let me expand a little. The “sitting on the balcony chair” thing channelized the Chi only for that point in time. Sometimes, results improve when I watch the match on the move, sometimes I have to completely refrain from watching the match to bring home the bacon. I must confess that in my enthusiasm to provide tailwind to our team, I sometimes tend to go overboard. On the first day of the last test, I watched sitting in a Padmasana pose on the floor in my study with all the lights off (a tactic I use only in extreme cases), resulting in a nasty shoulder injury to Woakes. OK, that was testing the boundary of fair play but cricket is a tough sport and I believe in competing hard. 

 

It is not just about the room or the position, sometimes even random things like working on a presentation during the match helps in generating positive outcomes. Word and Excel though, I avoid. Empirically I’ve found them to be quite disruptive and harbingers of bad energy. You’ll never believe this one - through sheer trial and error, I have established that I can unfailingly change the course of the match when I use this contraption that I have for inhaling steam. I just switch it on, inhale the steam for a few minutes, all the while watching the match from above the rim. It delivered solid results on day 5 of test 4, when I held firm like a wall between the Englishmen and the Jadeja – WaSu partnership.

 

I serendipitiously discovered this faculty of mine during IPL 2010. When I realized that my leaning on the cupboard in my son’s room while balanced on one leg had led to that over where Dhoni hit Irfan Pathan for 18 runs in the last over at Dharmasala, I knew I had the gift. I have since become somewhat of a specialist in reading the signs and doing the needful for CSK. That CSK are one of the most successful franchises in IPL is a matter of utmost pride and gratification for me.

 

By now you would have gleaned that the approach has to account for the tournament, the opponent and so on – multiple and complex factors to contend with and I confess I do sometimes get it wrong. Like with CSK over the last two years. I have just been unable to  find the right combination of device, room, chair, posture, diet and all the other small things that would have ensured victory for CSK. I try to take solace in the fact that everyone goes a bad patch, but one can’t help feeling miserable, especially when an entire franchise and all its fans are hoping for good results and one is just not able to do enough to bring it home…

 

I realize, at this stage, some of you may be a little incredulous. To the sceptics, I’ll point to chaos theory which postulates that when a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, it could lead to a tornado in Tennessee. In all humility, I’ll not claim to be the only one who can pull this off. The story goes that when India won the famous Eden Gardens test match against Australia in 2001, nobody moved in the Indian dressing room when Dravid and Laxman were at the crease. Though, as an expert practitioner I must say that simply not moving sounds like beginner level stuff. 

 

Anyway come September, we have the Asia cup in the UAE. I’ll be a little tired from seeing Sinner through to the finish line in the US Open just before that, but hopefully will have enough juice to ensure a good outing for team India as well. I only hope Gill and Gambhir adopt a bit of strategic continuity. This constant chop and change of tactics has me, in turn, moving tack continuously and frankly It becomes a little tiresome. Especially when I am destined to go through my lifetime without any sort of reward or recognition for the favourable outcomes I engender…

 

 

Dedicated to all the ardent Indian fans who refuse to see their role as mere spectators of a sport and instead consider themselves as an integral part of the team, venting their angst through social media posts, breaking things in the room or, from a more utilitarian standpoint like me, doing all they can to channel the right energy to our boys…