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ET Phone Home... [Bina Shah (Pakistan)](Bina Shah (Pakistan) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) I suppose it makes me officially "old" to admit it, but I lived and traveled in the time before we had the huge technological conveniences that the Internet affords us today. So much has changed since I went off to college in 1989 that when I look back, I wonder how I managed to do anything. We take so many things for granted today - even living in Pakistan, which isn't the most technologically advanced country in the world - hardly stopping to think how far we've advanced and how easy it's made our lives, even in the few short years since the beginning of the 21st century. For example: applying to college was a nerve-wracking procedure. These days, you get online, go to the college or university Web site of your choice, download an application to print out and fill, or just fill it out directly online. You pay the registration fee by online credit card. You get your acceptance emailed to you. You reply back by email to say you're attending. (Plus your standardised tests are all registered and paid for online in the same way). Boom! College apps, done. Compare this to how I applied to college. First, I went to my guidance counsellor's office and looked through the college catalogues she had on the shelves. Yeah, catalogues, those big directories of the college with glossy photographs and an application form at the end. If you were lucky she had the college you were interested in, so you could photocopy the application form and take it home to fill out in pencil by hand, then get it typed (or type it yourself if you were lucky enough to have access to an electric typewriter) out by your father's secretary. Any mistakes would make you have a heart attack because they'd have to be erased or painted over with White-Out that made the forms look nasty, and you were convinced that the bad condition of the forms would get you rejected immediately. If she DIDN'T have the application, you'd write - BY HAND - to the college, requesting a catalogue. Then you'd wait three months for it to arrive in Karachi because they always sent the catalogues third class or by sea. When the catalogue finally came, if it hadn't gotten lost or stolen or confiscated in the mail, you'd go through the entire process outlined in the above paragraph. You'd have to somehow get your hands on a foreign currency check for $60. Either a relative from America would write one for you, or you'd beg your dad to get you a banker's draft (and you had no way of knowing whether the college would accept it or not). You'd fill out all the forms. You'd either send them with a relative or friend flying over to the US, or you'd send them from Pakistan and pray. You wouldn't know until two months after you'd sent the application whether or not it had even reached, and that too only if you called the Admissions Office to find out. Sometimes the college was nice and would send you a postcard saying they'd gotten your application but that certain documents were missing. You'd sweat bullets getting the documents in, praying they'd reach on time. Your essays? Forget sending them by email to some kindly relative to look over and correct overnight. What email? Nobody had email back in 1988. God got a lot of prayers from December to April, if I remember correctly. You'd think that once you got in, that was it, right? Nope. Guess again. Getting the money for your tuition fees was a nightmare because back in those days, the free flow of foreign currency was yet a gleam in Nawaz Sharif's eye. You'd have to have your tuition amount approved by the State Bank, and then released in instalments, which wasn't always accepted by the college or university that had accepted you. You'd have to beg a kindly relative again to pay your fee so your parents could repay them. You'd make your travel arrangements and your ticket would come - a precious document. If you lost it, no easy way to just go and print it out again from your email account. You'd have to go to the airline office and cry for them to issue you another one. You'd carry it close to your heart, along with your traveller's checks and what precious foreign currency you could acquire from the black market. That's right, because foreign currency was restricted for Pakistanis. Only if you were studying abroad were you allowed a certain amount of dollars every month to be remitted to you through the Bank. And it would have to come in a draft form, BY MAIL. FROM PAKISTAN. You'd make the journey by plane. At every stop you'd look for a phone booth to call Pakistan. You'd have to pay by cash because Pakistanis didn't have credit cards until the early 1990s. Nor were there mobile phones to text your parents to tell them you'd arrived safely. Forget FaceTime or Skype. No Internet until 1994, and none of those technologies came about until after 2005. At school, you'd talk to your parents once or twice a week, if you were lucky, for maybe ten minutes at a time. We were lucky in that we had a rare direct dialling telephone line, meaning we wouldn't have to book a trunk call through an operator. But it was still exorbitantly expensive - sixty rupees per minute - so the phone calls were restricted to twice a week. Calling Pakistan from the United States was as expensive - almost five dollars a minute. There was email, but only between academic institutions, so you couldn't email your family, couldn't send them photos of you, couldn't talk every day on Skype. My father would hand-write me a letter once a month, along with the draft he'd send me for my allowance. I remember those letters, loving missives, filling me in on some news from home, but never anything depressing or disturbing. There were no Internet news sites, no Dawn.com, so I couldn't really keep up with what was happening back home. You can't imagine the disconnect. When you travel these days, you feel like you're still with your family, thanks to technology. Back then, you felt as though someone had pulled the plug on your life with them, and you were adrift in a vast ocean, with only the memory of the shore living on in your mind until the next phone call, the next letter. I saw Gravity recently in the cinema and the aching solitude of space reminded me of what it felt like to travel and live abroad without the aid of our Internet-based technologies. If anyone asked me would I want to travel to the past in a time machine, I would say no. I wouldn't be able to bear the loneliness.Is there anyone out there....? (c) 2014 Bina Aisha Shah. All Rights Reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info, an Albawaba.com company |