Playing Cards in an iPod Generation

As I move around the city of Delhi, I come across two kinds of people. In the seedy Nehru Place area of Delhi, where I have my office the lunch break sees every empty space occupied by groups of men squatting on newspapers. They are laughing and chatting among themselves as they play cards and exchange easy gossip in n atmosphere of easy and effortless camaraderie. The sight of people crowding out narrow aisles by squatting and idling away their time is by playing cards is not pleasant one, especially as the lunch breaks look rather extended at the expense of the stated working hours. Besides, I was brought up in a culture which considers playing cards an abomination and a hobby fit only for the dissolute... Besides, cards games were considered in my family, just a whisker’s leap away from the practically unforgivable sin of gambling. Although I don’t relish several things about card games and that is probably ingrained in me, I cannot but notice the fellowship and friendship that it generates and sustains.

In the evening, I meet an altogether group of people as I travel back home in my chartered bus. This is a different crowd and a wired crowd , in the sense that all or most of the passengers in the bus have a pair of wires sticking out of their ears which disappear some where into their clothes. No the passengers are not all wearing hearing aids or appliances; they are just immersed in their own private world , the wires discreetly disappearing into discreetly or indiscreetly kept mobile phones or music players. Most have mobile phones which have at least an FM Radio in built and many have an mp3 player built in too. Most of the affluent ones do not use chartered buses but a few who do flash their snazzy Apple iPods or Sony Mp3 walkmans or their garish Chinese imitations.

The difference between the people who I see in the afternoon and the ones I travel back with could not b starker. The first lot is mostly people, who are in their late forties or fifties. Most appear not to be gizmo savvy, and indeed if this crowd has mobile phones which are possible, they are obviously not hopelessly in love with it. No wires follow them around as they hunker down with their worn out playing cards on stair cases and aisles. Theirs is a parallel universe where companionship, friendship and camaraderie are every thing and the fulcrum around which their lives revolve. Even though card playing is not the healthiest of pastimes, it certainly provides human connectedness among people. The evening crowd is self immersed. Each one is tuned in – to the Radio Mirchi or the Radio City or their Himesh Reshammiya music track. It is a self contained, atomized universe devoid of any neighborly conversation.

The FM channels are all full of call in programs and the telephone lines seem to be chock full of callers wanting to hat up the anonymous Radio Jockeys but there is no conversation happening across people. The medium of diversion in the middle aged crowd of the afternoon is a cheap pack of cards; in the passengers of the evening bus, it is the ubiquitous mp3 player. Neither an addiction to a pack of cards nor an addiction to a radio channel can be termed healthy. But whereas cards seem to allow for bonding, comradeship and companionship to develop and flourish, the FM radios and the iPod develop isolationism , individualism and an atomization leading to an increasing culture of independence and of having little use or sensitivity to the other , to he neighbor whom I am called to love. A pack of cards or an iPod dangling from the neck – the jury is sill out on which is more damaging of the two.