Unlike earlier days when things were made to last, today everything is disposable
We’ve
had to get rid of our TV set, which was eight years old, and was acting
up. Can’t you repair it? i asked the technician. He looked at me as
though i’d morphed into a Martian. You don’t repair eight-year-old TVs;
you throw them away, he said.
So we got rid of it at a literally
throwaway price, a small fraction of what we’d paid for it. Now, as i
sit and look at the new TV we’ve bought to replace the old one, i can’t
help but think of its impending demise a few short years from now.
It’s
not just TV sets that belong to what could be called the throwaway
culture. Cars, computers, mobile phones, anything you care to name seems
to be made so as to ensure that it will self-destruct, or be rendered
useless, within a relatively short span of time. And that short span of
time seems to be getting shorter and shorter.
No sooner have you
got the very latest smartphone/ music system/ iPad/ electric nostril
hair clipper when a NEW! IMPROVED! UPDATED version of the darn thing is
launched and you find yourself saddled with the old model which your
raddiwala might have to be cajoled into carting away.
It’s
called ‘built-in obsolescence’, designing devices in such a way as to
make them disposable almost as soon as you’ve bought them. What are
known as ‘consumer durables’ should more appropriately be called
‘consumer disposables’ in today’s transient technology where yesterday’s
new is today’s old.
In earlier times, people didn’t merely buy
durable goods like cars, or refrigerators; they developed a relationship
with them. They weren’t just mechanical devices; they were part of the
family, and like other family members they often developed all manner of
idiosyncratic behaviour – rattles, wheezing, sudden stops and starts –
as they grew older, endearing traits that humanised them.
Instead
of being ashamed of their age, people were proud of how old their car
was, or their fridge, or their music system. It showed how well they’d
been looked after, like aging relatives whom one cherished.
Those
days are dim memories in today’s disposable culture of inbuilt
obsolescence. To which India boasts one notable exception: the
never-say-die neta who successfully defers all attempts to be put out to
pasture and comes with a genuinely lifetime guarantee.
(Source: Times of India, dated 03-12-2014)
