Pout-detector Selfie-taker

Pout – verb - push one's lips or one's bottom lip forward as an expression of petulant annoyance or in order to make oneself look sexually attractive.

Pouty - adjective, I made.

My parents never understood my pouty behaviour since I was three. I think they got me all wrong. All along!

In class five I would pout at the head-taller guy from next door who got us home-made pickle instead of my favourite candy and they got the pout all wrong. I would go to the club and pout at one uncle’s drummer son, class seven, playing a lifeless tune and they misunderstood my pouty lips. Again and again, and countless number of tender-aged times. Finally, packed me off to a convent, where the hems of skirts met the elastic of socks and skin was a bad four letter word, after ‘pout’ that is. Oh, I didn’t stop pouting! In an all girls’ nunnery convent there are more reasons for a 15 year old to pout than God will ever know or Heavens get to see. 

What a bad childhood.

But all that seems to be from a Stone Age past. Today, much like the Blue Stocking Movement of yore, the lips have found their own revolution. Say, the Red Lipstick Movement. It has spread like jelly set wrong, or not set at all. The camera in the phone holds the mirror up to your soul lens up to your mole, and all you have to do is click. Save Share that DIY Selfie face for viral eternity, often making such luscious expressions even the camera battery gets wet dreams. So, just like the British suspected trouble the moment two men collected to pee and discuss politics on the road-side, so you can expect a pouty selfie soon as three giggly girly lips come together, posing in front of a phone camera I mean. But all this you know already, if you too, like me, live on FB (activation-deactivation-‘where is he?'-grand comeback included!)

Lets talk technologi technologee technology, not really my forte but I do know the green wire stands for peace on Earth and black one to remind me I’m a live wire even with my black dress on. Hear on! 

Young India is not just collared and wired and earning fat bucks (and voting and posting pictures!). The youth of today is always in the fifth gear. The B/W picture of Contentment (man sitting on an arm chair in his verandah in a baniyan, scratching arm pits and hearing flies flutter) no longer pleases them. They compete till kingdom comes, hard! Cutting throats for not just plum postings, corner offices and cushy cars but even to declare to the world’s winds in Alia Bhatt’s voice that ‘I love my baby lips muah muah’ and that I am always ‘Lakme selfie ready!’ Posters for ready reference below.

Therefore, due to such competition the selfie situation is quite tensed, and all cameras and phone batteries are feeling the heat, listening to ‘lens lens in my phone, who’s the pouty-est on the globe’ and God forbid if the answer is as unsatisfactory as the pseudo-elevation of a push-up whose straps have lost elasticity. God forbid, but then, it always is. 

In such days where pouts are vying to occupy selfie space, necks sprained into kamasutric positions to make nose hair hide itself, eyes going smoky and doe-like and windows to a thirsty soul, we need our two hands free to come to our self-service. (Oh not that way, no! You get me wrong!) No longer should we need to finger the camera button. So, I speak to software developers to create what we can call Pout-Detector Hands-free Long-lasting Selfie-Taker (dictionaries can revise their meanings of ‘selfie’!) Much like a smile-detector, but who is smiling? So, the moment the lips start moving towards your own image in the phone camera, the phone takes a picture. It is the highest form of self-love, the aspiration to kiss your own image (and God won't mind for man was created in His image) and look good doing it too. This deserves the biggest brains ever born to work on it. 

And when this software is invented and installed, what larks! 

Here is my phone resting between my floss and my tooth-brush, and there it detects my pout and clicks me in multiple poses – hands in just washed hair, hands in hair combed front, hands in hair combed back, hands cupping the cheeks, the chin, the … you get the point! Or when you are cooking pao bhaji, trying to get yourself in the frame with mashed potatoes drowning peas all bubbling in the pan, you place the phone on the steel utensil rack, pouting with a buttery intensity. It will love your bebbe lips, and hands – holding ladle, holding the two handles of the kadhai, closing eyes and smelling aroma. Clickety click it will go, detecting the pout on its own. 

But then, what about Equality, our favourite idea? 

I demand equal representation of all kinds of pouts in the pout-detector software. Equal representation. (Remember my childhood I just shared above?) Pouts happen automatically too and so many are asexual in nature. Like when watching TV without specs you may pout. Or when constipated (try!). Or when Arnab Goswami is being his real age, or even AAP? Then the pout we make when we go ‘tch tch’, or the exhaling one when in pain while getting a tattoo. How about the one which delivers lungular smoke up into the clear skies and even the one which we make to remove hair strands from our chin with plucker? The phone should be able to detect and preserve all kinds of pouts - sexy as well as asexy. No sexy-ist bias please.

Okay, I am suddenly all alive with my own brainchild.

I am sending this article to Rajiv “butter skin” Makhni of the cleft chin gadget guru fame. He will understand what I mean. Only yesterday I read this piece by him, recommending best phones for selfie taking. In him I will find a nodding head when he reads this. Perhaps, he will call divert me to the right people who will, like me, see that the next big thing needs to be Pout-Detector Hands-free Long-lasting Selfie-Taker (in whichever order their lips please!)

Muah!  

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - The next big thing - What will the next must-have technological innovation be? Jetpacks? Hoverboards? Wind-powered calculators?]

83-13-30 - and Shopping

No, the title is not supposed to be a version of 36-24-36. Neither mine nor yours! Rein in that brain, rest it and just read. These are years – 30 years before 2013 was 1983. 17 years from today will be 2030. Too many numbers to begin with? Shopping sounds better. So, let’s proceed.   

1983. 

Notable piece of news? The Cricket World Cup trophy came home. Even bigger news? The author of this post was born. Yes, my doctor deliverer held me up even as Kapil Dev held up The Cup, this very same year. Now, if I was born in 1983, would I know what shopping in 1983 was all about? I am sure if I thought hard enough, I would remember where my frilly frocks came from. But, I decided to ask around. Parents, their parents, maternal aunt, paternal uncle, the 1000 or so cousins born before me, even asked the kid brother who was yet to come, really. That hard I worked to know how, just how, were people shopping back in 1983? With land-lines more ‘dead’ than alive, mobile something that Batman travelled in and online banking an impossible idea from future colonies on Mars, people were simply going to the market with their lists and picking things up. Maybe stopping over at the bank and withdrawing some money, in case the monthly budget kept in the envelope under the flower vase had run out already. Market meant a Paltan Bazaar. Shop meant a generational general merchant (& Bros. & Sons variety) where all branches of the family had been buying the time-tested brands from. Clothes were handed down, or bought in whole-sale from good bargain shops. Luxury was NRI relatives (God bless those ones from then) getting you a Sony TV, wooden body and wooden screen cover complete. Needs were few, choices of brands even fewer and the will to experiment with the fancy looking-foreign sounding “imported” bottles in exclusive shops (British ancestry, please) reserved for the elite. That was shopping where I was born, in 1983.

2013.

Three decades down, and we enter the Now. The breaking news is breaking through your TVs, so that I need not tell you about. Plus, I wasn’t re-born. But shopping? Seems like that has been re-born in an entirely different avatar! The groceries either come home through our telephones or are picked up in super-market. In 10 feet of retail space you see 10 brands of tooth pastes and 100 different brands of women-attracting deodorants (though none for keeping them). Clothes with Italian tags, bed sheets named after Greek Goddesses and even dedicated sections for keeping children and pets occupied even as you pick and choose from shelves that reach the sky. The lift will zoom you till the car and then goodbye cart, and mall and supermarket – our monthly groceries as well as a few indulgences have been bought, and hefty parking charges for our wheels paid. Good deals on electronics, books, cameras, phones can also be picked up from Karts christened after the products. No shipping charges, payment on delivery sometimes, cash back guarantee if the customer is not satisfied, secure banking transactions and there you have it – Sir Shopping in shining armour, sitting beneath that button and always at your service with just a click. And the latest from the online shopping grapevine?  eBay’s ebay.in CHECK - a one-stop, auto drop down wonder, gift-wrapped for us as a tiny button, downloaded on our tool bar within seconds and always at our beck-and-call. Press it and see the best deals on the site for anything you desire. Ah! Fingers can continue to be lazy, wallets smile happy and more time on our hands to philosophize on the pot, or elsewhere. Oh! As for that NRI luxury and Sony TVs from 1983? Well, last I checked my cousin Sachin a.k.a Steve from the US of A was busy buying Rakhi gifts from this very .in site. Genius invention for our generation! Even Einstein must be wondering – Jeez, why didn’t I think of it?

2030.

Fast forward, not 30 years but a little over half of that – 17 years. Bad mathematics? Well, partly. But mostly because if yesterday technology was leaping forward at the speed of sound through air, today it is moving with the speed of light itself. So 3 decades of the past are equal to half that time of the future – techie-wise. And it will only take lesser time for bigger leaps, as my 30 years turn into 60. S.i.x.t.y.? Wow, time to change the topic and get back to shopping 17 years from now. 

Even though my mane looks like Einstein’s in humidity, I am not him most certainly. But I do shop online, a lot, and am experienced with the good, the bad and the ugly bits of ordering your objects of desire through .coms and the more patriotic .ins. After burning the midnight yellow CFL in my lamp as well as a handful of grey cells, I came up with the following 5 ideas that can change the orbit of online shopping into a wider-smoother-faster ellipse in 2030.

Idea 1 – Auto-Replenish

Dear post-it on the fridge, you just lost your job. No more grocery listing. No more keeping a tab on beer in the chiller or oil in the pantry. Auto-replenish technology will send a signal to the online shopping portal whenever the stock is dwindling and poof! It will be delivered to you even before you spot it was over. Radar racks and censors in the fridge will do that listing for you, send the re-order list to the portal and get your needs delivered at your door step in good time. Radical? I think so too! You can now save your post-its for love-ly messages instead which say – ‘Out for dinner with friends, honey. Cook yours, will you!’ Of course, all inside a little red heart! 

Idea 2 – 3-D Prototypes

By 2030, 3-D printers will take over homes – be it for helping with the kids’ school projects or sending a sample of your wedding card to the generous Sony TV NRI family from once-upon-a-time. Why not use them for shopping too? Free ordering/printing of prototypes of products might help us with choosing options. Will the size of the phone look good in my hands? Are those ear rings too big for my face? Will an iPod armband for cycling feel comfortable? Will save us so much hit-and-try buys of wrong shapes and sizes and thickness and depths. Don’t you think?

Idea 3 - Expert Advice

Let’s face it. Online shopping portals offer everything – variety, exchange offers, best prices and bonanza deals. What they do not offer? Expert advice, like the one available in the form of a goodly young man who follows you in a departmental/electronic store in a tie and guides you about the various specifications of the products you are looking at. Most importantly, he gives you a much-needed inter-brand comparison. No, I do not mean product reviews which are available aplenty on forums across www. I mean a person who could tell me, for instance, which rim tape is best for my bicycle, or which lens should be my next buy - right then and there. For all the times I haven’t really been sure of what I want or need, even if it were an animated avatar doing the expert talking I would not mind. Would you? Make him good-looking, feed in the information, the know-how and the comparisons and dear Factoid, I will be ready to fall in love with you. 

Idea 4 - Delivered, urgently

My pizza comes home in 30 minutes. Why can’t the handbag I want to gift my sister coming for dinner in an hour? Or ColicAid my baby’s tummy needs for gassy fuss at 2am? Or maybe just a tissue paper roll even as the pressure on the pot is on its way? Big things or small, fancy or mundane, a little networking with small shops around and there we have it (Yes, small shops will always be around!). Delivery within minutes! EBay does this already, as my experience of ordering on it tells me.  But we can make it faster, by many hours! And then, does not the idea of including the stores in the online ordering system beam better than all of government’s Inclusion Policies put together? That provokes a thought!

Idea 5 – Artificial Intelligence, at my service

Getting personal is not always a bad thing, especially if we are talking about personalized shopping services. What if a site more intelligent than me can keep track of my past purchases, memorize my interests, remember the products I dig and prompt suggestions every time I need them? Say, in the type of books I buy or the kind of gadgets that suit my interest? And equally important, not overwhelm me with information on products I really don’t care about. I mean, why flash pictures of designer ties to a hippie? We do know sometimes technology can be better than us. After all, smart phones are, aren’t they? So why not the AI on my favourite shopping portal. I can just let my head be in peace. It’s 2030 people, who wants to use their own brains?

For now, I have used mine. All 30 years of it, and even beyond. While I wait for much-deserved patents for all 1-5 above, I will go look for a new pair of glasses. A press of a button away and poof! I already found what I was looking for. Look at that! If that’s not fast, funky and futuristic what is?

[Written for 'The future of shopping' contest hosted by IndiBlogger in association with eBay]