Hitting Old Age In High Definition

I think I’m getting old and I have a television to thank for this. You see, I was at a friend’s house recently and he had just gotten a new TV. It was a gigantic, black, painting-like beauty which he had hung in his drawing room. It worked much better than it looked. Picture quality – excellent; sound quality – good enough to cause his cat to go stone-deaf in a few years; channel playing when we switched it on – Aaj Tak. Excitedly, I took the remote from him and that’s when I took a huge leap into grandfatherhood.

The remote that I held in my hand was enormous. It had close to a 100 buttons, each named, numbered and coloured differently. At an earlier age, I could have randomly pushed 25 buttons and figured out each feature on this TV, including some that weren’t even there. Now I was afraid the TV would explode even if I moved the remote. Plus, nothing was written in the familiar way that I was used to. The only things I could identify were the buttons for volume and the buttons for changing the channel. But if you had asked me to mute the TV for you, I’d have to reach for the instruction manual. And that’s the tell-tale sign that you’re heading toward old age. Nothing says you’re getting old like reaching for the instruction manual when trying to figure out a device. A young person would never do that. Pah! They would have just used their fancy method of, ‘Fiddling’.

And the more I watched it, the more I wanted to say the catchphrase of us, old-timers: “Why weren’t there TVs like this in our time?” The TV – if it could be called that – was something bordering on magical compared to the clunky, tubby boxes that I had grown up on. To begin with, it was High Definition. Things were so clear on this TV that it seemed as if the old technology for making televisions involved filling them with dense fog.

The last indication of an imminent old age is having an irrational loathing toward things you can’t understand. For me, it came less as loathing and more as mild depression toward this glitzy, novel technology. It was just so depressing seeing channels in High Definition. When I saw a soap opera in HD, I could see the plot loopholes more clearly (“How could she possibly believe that’s her husband. On this HD TV I can clearly see, he looks nothing like the man she lost in that car accident.”) Earlier when I watched football on my fuddy-duddy television, the players all looked like nameless blobs, or in other words, like me. Now, in HD, I could not only read the names on their shirts but I could also see each definition on every muscle of their body. They suddenly seemed nothing like my low-definition self. Worst of all was when I put on FTV and saw those models going down that ramp in clarity that I would only imagine when I was 13 and home alone. It just made me want to moan it out loud, no matter how old it made me seem: “Why weren’t there TVs like this in our time?”