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Fast Access home Internet connections have been on the rise and the commercials are abuzz with slashed rates and intense competition to grab a healthy chunk of the consumer’s rising need for speed. Right now, I am already having second thoughts about changing my Internet service provider but the thoughts of forking out a penalty for my contract termination is holding me back. The Comcast commercial splashing $19.99 price tags for high speed cable access does not help.
I remember the slow old days of VSNL dialup access in India, waiting for an eon for a measly 50kb image file to download. In the Internet stone ages, I was trying to impress my friends by showing them the amazing search capabilities of Yahoo and started downloading a Star Wars video clip from some fan site. The 849kb clip took just a little over one hour and 34 minutes to download, leaving me red-faced, while my prehistoric friends guffawed at my display of the World Wide Wait. Those were the days, when you could halt the image download after reading the previously all-important, now obsolete Image ALT tag. I remember studying whole textbook chapters as I waited for the 1024 x 768 size wallpapers to download. The noise of my dad walloping my ass upon seeing the astronomical phone bills were far louder than me shrieking in frustration when the modem disconnected at the 99% mark.
Those were the days when I couldn’t really admit to my dad that I spend those precious phone minutes on downloading Madhuri and Urmila wallpapers instead of working on his project feasibility reports. I sincerely believed that moving your cursor on the download progress bar at the bottom of the screen in a particular cyclic manner actually willed the file to download faster.
However as the connection speeds increased, so did the applications requiring higher bandwidth. The Net experience is not complete without streaming video, Flash websites, etc. I can simply never be fast enough for everything. Thinking philosophically, that holds true also for the bounties of life. No matter how much you possess, you always desire more. Samadhaan, a word that euphemistically signifies “enough is enough, you better not ask for more” is a virtue not often easily achieved.
I have a simple functional IBM ThinkPad but the latest commercials on the jazzy laptops that Apple or Compaq offer have almost made me succumb to the temptations of “Anti-Samadhaan” but thankfully pecuniary limitations right now does not make the resistance any difficult.
by Patrix | on Monday, November 17th, 2003 at 1:07 pm | 
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