My daughter's friend flew out of the country recently to begin her university education. This is a girl who has been friends with my daughter since their primary school days and though their respective paths had parted when they went to different high schools, they have remained fast friends over the years. She was accompanied by her mother on her trip in order to assist in admission formalities.
She was going to one of the universities in the UK and when I remarked to my daughter that she was lucky to be an integral part of the digital and information age where the world today is truly a global village given that you can connect with and contact someone virtually anywhere in the world with a computer or a mobile phone, it got me reminiscing about my own experiences flying off to far off lands to study in the university in the 1980's.
Those were the days when local university admission (at the University of Nairobi-UON) was a hit or miss affair since it was based on the number of available university places in a given year and therefore on the pass mark attained by that many number of people. This meant that in some years a mean grade of B- was adequate to get you into the hallowed precincts of the university while in others you were not guaranteed to get admission even with a mean grade approaching B+. This also meant that competition to get admission was fierce more so for the professional courses like engineering, medicine etc where without an A there were no guarantees of admission. Other universities-private or public-were practically non existent at the time.
Suffice is to say that many of us unlucky enough to attain the minimum pass mark for admission to UON found our way to foreign universities mainly in a country a scant 5 hours flying time from Jomo Kenyatta Airport in a famous sub-continent. I was lucky that my parents had some Indian friends in Nairobi and when it became evident that I was headed to India for my further studies, they established contact with them so that I could be met by their extended family members in Bombay. Neither of us having met the other and with no way of exchanging photos or correspondences then, it was decided that I would wear a suit with a white ribbon on the lapel in order to be identified by them. My parents could not accompany me to India to assist in my admission, so there I was at Sahar Airport in Bombay in a warm suit at 11.00 pm at night in tempratures of 34 degrees centigrade being met by total strangers after my first overseas flight whom I couldn't even call even if I wanted to!! Today you exchange pictures through email, Twitter, Facebook etc and the various other social media while you are still miles away and then contact the person meeting you at the airport on phone as you step out of the a plane if you are on international roaming.
Another incident that I recall vividly was the horrendous expense and unreliability of international calls. In my case I called home only once about a month after I landed in India for the whole time that I was there though others called their parents more frequently for their own reasons. You had to book the call through the international telephone operator often a good half an hour before you were sure that your folks would be at home and able to answer your call so that when the connection was made they would be at home and available to speak to you.
You could barely hear or understand the person on the other end of the line, so bad was the connection, even if you raised you voice and there were ghostly noises and raised and lowered volumes as the call progressed, often cutting off altogether, and you could only hope that your plea for money had been heard and not lost in the garbled world of the nascent international communication space then. Often these calls were reverse or collect calls meaning that the person you were calling picked up the expensive tab of receiving that phone call. The mobile phone changed all that 10 years later with instant contact on a person to person basis.
The telegram was then the quickest means of communication but there was an unwritten rule that telegrams were only sent or received in cases of an extreme emergency involving a financial crisis, a fatality or something akin to that in its seriousness. Ordinary humdrum day to day issues were never conveyed on telegram lest the recipient of the missive misunderstood it to represent a tragedy and keeled over dead with a heart attack even before reading the same. Obviously the fax (now almost obsolete) and email were things we never dreamed would be invented to make our lives and communication easier a scant 10 years or so later.
Another bone of contention was foreign exchange approvals and international money transfer services. I can only guess at the agony my father had to go through to get my quarterly foreign exchange approval so that he could then apply for the bankers draft in Indian Rupees that he then sent to me by registered post which often took upto 10 days to be delivered to my doorstep. After the deposit to my bank account, it often took another 14 days to clear through the Indian banking system. Today from the comfort of your living room you are able to debit your account and send funds instantly through internet banking to virtually anywhere in the world in minutes or thorough Western Union and Moneygram and a host of other money transfer agents and services something unheard of during my days as a university student.
So there you have it, my daughter will be able to communicate to her friend daily if she so wishes on Facebook, Twitter and What's up. For more personal written messages she may send her an email or for the juiciest gossip a phone call will cost her 10 bob for 3 minutes, about the cost of two bananas. Her father can send her money directly to her bank account, or pay up her credit card bill so that she can access funds at the ATM, or even send her a birthday gift of some cash through Western Union.
With the human ingenuity at work and the absolute embracing of the modern technologies that we see today, it is obvious that times have changed.
I wonder what it will be like in another 30 years??
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