I am a gadget freak.
A music lover.
Crazy about movies.
Awesome photography charges me up.
So does great ads…
And yet to get used to reading e-books
Why am I saying all this?
Well I have almost three-four TB (Terrabytes) worth of data. Movies, music, ads, images and the works. I want to expand more… Have more data on western series (Lost, 24, Dexter, Mad Men etc etc… God why does this list go on and on?) I am also on the lookout for great NGC (National geographic) images. World cinema haunts me. Coz there’s nothing better than watching such finely crafted movies…
But I have an issue. While I understand technology, the minimal space it encapsulates, the speed it delivers and the unsurpassed quality that it promises… It has it’s own share of problems…
I usually sit on a weekend night with my drive attached to my laptop and keep searching for my fave company be it a good thriller, horror, drama or some wonderful world cinema… what it does is that it takes time for me to get used to the storyline and hence I end up watching, skipping, searching, watching, skipping… the movies all over again! I keep doing this and by that time I realize I am already two hours ahead of time and there’s very little time left for me for watch anything of my choice…
Technology has really spoilt myself with choices like these. The collection keeps multiplying every week and I end up buying yet another external hard drive six months later to accommodate the ever increasing titles. Just as it has increased my film viewing habits since now I have a wide collection to choose from, it has also increased my confusion and I am yet to figure out a way out of this madness.
I was very happy during the early days… I was happy with my VCR and magnetic tapes (cassettes) collection. Atleast I stopped buying stuff when the shelf was overflowing… I also used to see/ hear almost all of the them over and over again. They all were well utilized. There were no issues of data being stored somewhere and me searching them till eternity!
During my times in Middleast when I was just starting to earn better than before, I used to buy a CD almost everyday! Yeah, everyday! It was like coffee for me. Like brushing my teeth in the morning. Like having a bath… that normal. Something that I used to do everyday. This almost continued unstopped for almost a year and a half. By the time I saw my shelf raining with CDs I shifted gears to iPOD. iPOD helped me to consolidate all my songs into a digital format and lo! My music collection alone ran into some 30,000 songs… that ran into some 28 days non-stop music (On iTunes if you add songs more than 10K it will display the total running time of these songs in hours and days!) I had all the collection in the world but would always listen to an RD or may be ARR or maybe REM and maximum a Coldplay or Dire Straits…
Digital collections surely helped us get all that we want.
But do we need this?
Do we really have the time for all this?
It’s a good ego massage to say I have this and that… and for all we know, it will just lie in some corner of your shelf that doesn’t even exist. And when it does, you are again generations ahead with some new technology that you don’t really need but want so desperately!
Sometimes you are stacked up so much that you don’t feel hungry.
I guess our digital dilemmas are something like that.



