Bear your Cross with pride.

The other day, while wading through a plethora of gifts bestowed on us on various occasions and stored away in our steel cupboard, I came across a Cross Select Tip Rolling Ball Pen with a rich brown enameled body, rather handsomely boxed. As I took it out to admire it, it triggered a memory. I’m backtracking to the late seventies and early eighties. I was working in Everest Advertising as a writer and enjoying a rather long spell of success. http://digbig.com/4yqay. This agency was run on feudal lines with many fiefdoms operating under an overlord. From time to time, durbar used to be held and favours bestowed on the deserving underlings among whom I happened to figure. One Diwali, I was among the select coterie to receive from the Overlord’s second-in-command under the benign gaze of the King-Emperor a golden Cross Ball Pen, a much coveted status symbols for executives. I was quite thrilled to get it although I did most of my writing on a typewriter. http://digbig.com/4yqba. Being absent-minded, I managed to lose my Cross soon enough and was much castigated by friends, well-wishers and associates for being so careless and uncaring.

Talk is cheap. It keeps them willingly under surveillance.

Aldous Huxley, I reckon, was only partly right about technology in Brave New World. He thought eugenics was the key to world governance. Actually, it turned out to be the insidious technology of communication. Take mobile phones as a case in point. By making them an affordable status symbol of contemporaneity, technology has made people wireless yet willing collaborators in their own surveillance. Now the powers that be can know where you are and what you are up to at any precise moment. And, what's ironical is that you are picking up the tab for your watchers. Similarly, the photophone has spawned a network of unwitting spies. The Big Brother may be watching you through whose cellphone you can never tell. So what about the emerging biometric technology of scanning fingerprints before permitting access to the ATM? Read an article on this topic at http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/12855627.htm.