Under-utilized Idiot

No, no…. I am not talking about myself. My manager however might claim this title apt for me, and rightly so. But, the idiot I am talking of is the one that gracefully adorns each of our drawing rooms. If I can correctly recollect the day the three roomies went to buy ourselves a television, we were pre-decided about getting one that is fairly cheap (the cheapest that would suit a family of three bachelor engineers) and of course, it had to be a CRT. We narrowed down to two sets; the seller was bent on selling us the more expensive one because it had one additional feature- one could vary amplitudes of different frequencies. All we understood after four years of electronics engineering was: it had better audio-control features! And to the seller’s disappointment, we had gone for the cheaper one.

When I look back today, I feel greatly pleased at our decision. Why? None of the three of us are ‘big’ cricket fans or movie freaks and as a result, we do not remain glued to the box. After spending (read ‘wasting’) the greater part of the day at office, we are usually tired to sit in front of the television. We however connect to the Internet. The reason, I feel, is TV doesn’t let you see (this is our case, of course) what you wish to see. On the other hand, the cyberspace allows you to roam about independently- browse to whichever website you want to, read on whatever topics allure you; watch whatever videos you are interested in, that particular day; listen to whichever songs you feel would suit your mood, that particular day.

The only time we get to sit together and watch the television is when we eat our dinner. But, we keep leapfrogging from one channel to another trying to decide what we should watch- we never arrive at a conclusion. Frustrated, we pass on the remote-control from one hand to another, hoping that decision-making abilities will eventually dawn on the other person. Surprisingly, we all fail most of the time and end up watching some bogus commercials. Weekends are supposed to be more entertaining but lazy people have lazier weekends- we are too sluggish to even walk to the next room to watch a television programme. For us, television has ceased to become a source of edu-tainment- it remains in that room of ours, gloriously welcoming every rare guest that walks into it and silently wishing someone would turn it on every night and switch several channels.