Today more than 60% of the India owns a mobile phone. Indian poverty line and economic measures would change if this being the index. The first part of the last decade of the 20th century, those were my early childhood days I recollect hardly any sight of a telephone. Later years of the same decade, I saw the landline phone here and there and slowly it became a household craft. Cordless phones were a trend in early 20th century. During my last days of school life, mobile phones started their advent. Basic nokia mobiles (now we need to call like so, but in those days they were the majorly known) were the tech gadgets in engineering days. Nokia 7610, Nokia 6600 were like Sirius and Canopus (the two bright stars in the earth’s night sky) among them and Moto-flip was an eye-candy. Smart phone (mobile phone with features of personal computer and few other digital features) was a popular trend during the days of my master’s. Now people go crazy about smart phones with changing features quite often.
Being witnessed the above the transformation, being an electronics engineer and now being in semiconductor industry I would go a little into the technological chronology. In IISc abbr. of ECE dept is Electrical Communication Engineering, as far as I know there is no other university or a college in India with first ‘E’ in ECE being Electrical rather Electronics. The dept was started in 1946 , a year before the first transistor was invented and the term Electronics was coined. In December 1947, the first transistor was invented and a decade after with first Integrated Circuit (IC) being made, the IC technology and the electronics industry grow rapidly than any other. Moore’s law an observation (not a physical or a natural law) that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years proved accurate for several decades with few transistors on a first IC to few millions on the present ICs. The advent of electronics changed the electrical engineering world and the advent of IC technology sheer accelerated the growth of electronics with different end products.
Coming back to the present smart phone world, on the flip side it has its own adverse effects. Health the major concerned one and the misuse of technology in all the ways which one could. Few people went on to say the worst and the dangerous invention in the last century is the cellular phone. It is true that not only mobile phones misuse of technology which is of any kind is no way a lesser jeopardy for a individual in particular and for a society in general but this should not be the reason to stop the progress of technology. Whenever I buy a mobile or advise anyone, the concern first is the SAR rating of the mobile. Specific absorption rate (SAR) is the rate at which energy is absorbed by the human body when exposed to a RF electromagnetic field and it should be within the norms. I see people putting their heads into the mobile phone all the time and space. What to say about these ? I want to bring Mahatma Gandhi here. In 1895, Mahatma Gandhi visited a Trappist monastery in the Natal highlands. He had then just begun his struggle against the racist laws of a regime that claimed to be ‘Christian’. The rulers went to Church every Sunday and read the Bible regularly, while discriminating Indians and more severely Africans. But among these monks he saw a very different kind of Christianity. He wrote ‘ the Trappists believe in no colour distinctions. The Natives are accorded the same treatment as the whites. They get the same food as the brothers, and are dressed as well as they themselves are. The contrast with the powerful white Christians of Natal was stark. It proves conclusively that a religion appears divine or devilish, according as its professors choose to make it appear’. It is indeed true here too with a little amendment ‘technology helps or destructs, according as its user choose to let it’.
That is mobile technology for you !
satta king