Unreal

Of late, I am drawing this and that on my iPad. I am trying to express my thoughts.

She asked, “Why don’t you draw these on real paper?”

----

Fifteen years ago, my seniors in grad school were buying digital cameras. I didn’t know what those things were. They told me, such cameras would directly make digital images without any film. That was so cool.

They bought digital cameras. Next year, I also bought one. Then I learnt a lot about photography. Many photographers were still in favor of the film though. The 35mm film gave them more control, they said.

Two years later, Nikon stopped making film cameras. Canon must have followed pretty soon. Films were certainly more real, but 99.99% of even the professional photographers chose to go digital.

----

She writes. I asked her, “Do you write with a pen on paper, or do you mostly type?”

She types. On a digital device. Typing is convenient. She can insert, delete, cut and paste, move pieces of text around. She can keep multiple versions of her writings easily. Certainly, those are not as real as manuscripts. But convenient.

----

Everything changed this way. Dip pens to fountain pens to ball pens. Handwritten to printed books. Papers to white background on screens. From dialling on analog phones to touching the screens of smartphones. Natural vegetables and meat to cultivated and hybrid ones. Real eyes to glasses, or contact lenses. Pacemakers. Even transplanted organs. Cool, convenient, sometimes harmful, sometimes life saving. Less real. But inevitable.

Whatever we felt as real, became more artificial ever since we can recall history. It will keep happening into the future.

Thirty years later I will ask, “Why are you not drawing it on the screen?”

Someone will tell me, “What’s the need? I can map my idea from my brain to yours.”

Cool, huh!

Unreal?