ALSphere Foundation
The other day, as I filled a form for remuneration for university exam duty, the form required me to fill details like Bank Account number, my registration ID as university examiner, the registration number of my vehicle, my contact number etc. I realized that I had to take help of my document details stored in Mobile’s Personal Notes. Even in my personal notes, there were so many passwords- one for college mail, another for personal links, still another for department, similarly bank details of my various bank accounts, passwords for ATM, Credit Card etc. I was completely dwelling and diving deep in the digital world. I had to search for the relevant information in this labyrinth of pins and passwords, and I felt low. Why can’t I remember these personal details. I remembered minute details as a kid. What has gone wrong with me? I concluded that my memory is becoming like a sieve, my mind registered this bitter fact and I became so conscious that I endeavoured to revise the registration number of my vehicle, my husband’s mobile etc to ensure that I remember them all, but every time I did so, I had an urge to look at my personal notes in the mobile, telling myself “Why this hassle? Why not seek shelter in the comfort zone of the digital revolution?”
The number conundrum didn’t end here and the pursuit of remembering my dear ones’ contact numbers felt anxiety-inducing. Earlier it wasn’t like this. I remembered my roll number of class 10th, UG and PG by heart and the number of landline phones of almost all my friends. In fact, in childhood, we remembered the house numbers of our friends, relatives and the postal addresses of dear ones were on tips. We had a sharp memory to recall immediately the pin code of our town and places where our grandparents lived. In fact, there used to be a competition among cousins to recall such details conducted by grandparents. There used to be chanting of multiplication tables regularly and we remembered tables like parrots.
How the times have changed! Now for any such detail, we instantly seek help from our mobiles. It is so easy, but once when I lost my mobile in college, and I was totally aghast as I didn’t remember even the password for opening my Almira’s locker in the department. I wanted to call my husband and twice repeated my husband’s contact number as I wasn’t too sure about it. It had made me panicky. What has gone wrong with me? Such poor memory I have developed; I was worried about my plight.
Post the digital revolution, our minds are numbers-fatigued with user Dislodging passwords, transaction passwords and pins which we must keep changing periodically to avoid any mishap. I had even maintained a diary to record all the details but failed to update it regularly as data kept on increasing and ever changing. The culprit is none other than we ourselves who have the habit of searching for everything through Google.
Use it or you lose it – this is perhaps what is happening with our memory. It is getting blurred every day with our ever-increasing dependence on gadgets for our ease and comfort. Unused memory box suffers from dependence syndrome on readily available ocean of information on our phone.
This may sound cliche that technology is a boom but in this era of ChatGPT and AI, we often get fatigued remembering our transition pass codes and pins. What we need to do is go back to the habit of noting down the details in a diary and update it weekly. This way we can keep our memory refreshed and once we write them on paper, we tend to remember them. Nothing like paper to save the day!
Ritu Kamra Kumar
