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Feature

The ever changing world

Syeda Sabita Amin

I was talking to my dad the other day, about how the world has changed.

He sighed, smiled and said that when he was young, one day a magazine published that in the future people would be able to listen to the radio as they walked and would also have portable electronic light in the dark. This was in the year 1945, and I'm talking about a portable hand radio and a flashlight.

He was telling me that as he grew older, the “cassette player” was invented, so he used to walk around with cassettes in his hand all the time. Funny thing is, one day my grandfather reported to my grandmother that her youngest son has become a chain smoker!

My grandmother obviously fell from the sky and refused to believe the statement. To prove it to her, one day he grabbed my dad's arm and pointed to his cassettes saying, "There's his packet of cigarettes!"

My dad explained to my grand parents that it was only a cassette. Not knowing what it still was, my dad in simple terms explained again. After understanding the fact that this thing actually plays music, my grandfather asked my dad to play a song by KL Saigal. My dad went on explaining that it was not a radio and only recorded music can be played.

Today we have all sorts of portable electronic devices. It's amazing that over the last forty years so much has changed. People back then would never even think about what we have today. Mp3 Players, ipods, personal computers, and one of the greatest innovation, the Internet... the list is never ending. And yet I think about how insatiable human beings are. All of what we have today still isn't enough.

I really wish my grandparents were here today. They would have been amazed to know how things have changed since their youth.

I can't help but wonder what would happen when I become a grandparent myself! If in the last forty years so much could change what could be lying ahead of us in the next forty years? Are we going to be able to tele-port from one place to another? Or be able to live. In a different world? I really wonder...

(The writer is a student of BRAC University)