ATMs and electronic transfer of funds have made life a lot easier for us. Thus, we can see people queued up in front of ATM booths like they would be in front of a teller's counter earlier. Yet, the news about two young lads withdrawing a whopping amount of 8 Million rupees through counterfeit bank ATM cards was alarming. It raises some grave questions. Are we safe in this rapid development of technology? Every day we are getting more and more dependent on machines, technology, gadgets and computers. There is no doubt that technology has made things lot easier and less time consuming for us but at the cost of our security. Things change so fast, systems get upgraded at par with the flicker of our eye lids. Advanced versions with lucrative additions are smiling at us even before we can accommodate ourselves to the one we are using. We need to keep up to the race. If we fail, we are left behind. However, we are creating a gap, a void of knowledge in this process. How many of us are completely familiar with the computer we use every day or the function of the cell phone we carry?
A manual typewriter's evolution to its electronic kin saw at least two decades of time. This meant that people were completely accustomed to it before switching to its next gen. On top of that a typewriter was a simple mechanism. Look at the gadgets we use today. They are so complicated that we just familiarize ourselves with the minimum requirement for us. We are unaware of its full utility. We do not even know its entire capability. Nevertheless, we need to keep us updated and hop from one version to another. That is our compulsion. In this course of joining an advanced technology before getting even ten percent familiar with the existing one, we are leaving a lot of loop holes, a huge void in knowledge. In a way we all are sitting on top of explosive, with a firearm in hand, fingers on trigger, ready to shoot even without properly knowing what a gun is. This can be dangerous. Time and again it has been proved like the incident mentioned above. We hardly care a dime about what wrong can it to, how vulnerable it might be when proper caution is not taken.
How many of us have read the terms and conditions of a software before installing it in our laptop? Have we ever thoroughly gone through the same when joining a social network? We read the news about Barack Obama restricting his daughters from using the facebook and surpass it as an act of yet another protective father. We hardly care about the risks of exposing ourselves in social networking sites. How many of us know that the data recorded in a social networking site, a hard disc of a computer or images and videos in the memory card of our cell phones are never erased once stored. An average gadget freak with aid of proper software can recover anything. Yet, we are tempted to shoot or click intimate moments without even thinking of the consequences. Glaring examples of such act creating havoc in people's life are no more the stories of foreign celebrities. They are countless in our country as well. Still, we do not realize, care or tend to ignore.
I agree that there are two sides of every coin and we cannot be taken aback from the race of evolution because of such perils. Yet, we sure are putting us in vulnerable position when we join the bang down without weighing the pros and cons. Everything should have its own span of time and the same applies for development. Untimely changes seldom bring positive results be that weather, politics or development of technology. Undue changes and unnecessary growth can bring along their own share of misfortune. Development too comes with its own quota of dent. Despite this, we have to admit that we are the witness of such an era where human beings have excelled their creative limit. They have excelled in every aspect. We have seen rapid changes in everything. We have seen tyrants collapsing, we have seen countries merging and separating, we have seen anger, protest and turmoil. Never before were we more inquisitive about things and never before have we found answers to millions of questions in different aspect of life. Even though, we cannot deny the fact that we have become the most confused generation the world has seen. We are compelled to keep ourselves at par with this maddening competitive race in life. Thus, we have ignored the basic question what it is leading us towards. We completely pretend to forget the fact that we are no more secure than the ostrich that buries its head in the sands and believes he is cosseted.
The most important question today is, are we destined to pay more grave results because of our over ambitious greed for rapid growth and development? Is what we take as blessing a curse in disguise?
