Persistence and transition

We live in the times where one product or a service is offered by multiple brands and businesses. All are competing for the attention of the average customer in real and virtual spaces. The competition has become so aggressive and manipulative that I suspect it has led to an erosion of basic human values of honesty, integrity and loyalty. Today the customer is a King who gets cheated. Back in the old times cheating the King would invite dangerous consequences. Now we live to see a game called “Cheat the King”. The most skillful cheater gets to be one of the most successful people in society.  The one whose cheating gets caught mostly gets to spend the rest of their life in London. If You Know, You Know! (IYKYK), I recently picked up this wonderful phrase that is trending all over social media. 

As a passionate consumer of social media and the Internet, I tend to spend a lot of time staring at the screen. The internet is the main arena of the “Cheat the King” game and hence most of us are found here. As a society we are strangely attracted to places where there is some kind of danger or a cause of potential loss. Places with potential loss are also the places of potential gain. Like the stock market, war zones and the internet (IYKYK). A consistent presence of screens in my life led me to convince myself that I needed to protect my eyes. Only eyes. I take my mind for granted. I feel minds can take care of themselves. It is only eyes that see the data that need protection. The minds that process them should be ok. This is also an attitude that is in demand. An attitude which considers external appearance more important than internal atmosphere. Clothes are more important than character. Taste is desired over health and matter over mind (IYKYK).

Coming back to the protection of my eyes and my familiarity with the internet, I went into one of the many flashy eyewear stores where they offer a free eye check and then write you an expensive bill for their spectacles. The experience in these stores is very interesting. We are made to feel like we are being offered something so premium at a cost so affordable that we cannot miss the chance to feel like a King for a common man’s fee. However with time all of us realise but a few of us admit that we might have got royally cheated. Our inability to accept and acknowledge this is also one of the important factors that helps these King Cheaters in their game. 

After close to a year of using these spectacles, I started experiencing great discomfort in my eyes. For a good amount of time I could not blame the anti glare, UV protection, true blue lense premium fibre glasses. However with time, pride wore off and discomfort persisted. The longer it takes for the pride to wear off the greater the damage it causes. An antidote to pride often looks like humility. However it is honesty. An honest acknowledgement of how one is feeling. This lack of honesty with oneself is a very desired quality for the “King Cheaters”. Our society is full of people with pride. Pride of their social status, religion, caste, education, legacy, basically some form of a fixed identity. Elections are being won by exploiting this quality in people. Many abusive relationships continue to stay intact due to this quality (IYKYK). However, thankfully my pride in my anti glare, UV protection, true blue lense premium fibre glasses wore off as I started having trouble seeing objects at a distance. 

I set off on my bike to scout for a better spectacle shop. In Bangalore, where I live, I realised that there are about three spectacle shops on average on every main street. As I was passing in front of these I found none of them appealing and my bike magically rode me towards the eye clinic that my father used to bring me in the early 90’s to help me cope with migraine. Back in the 90’s the doctor was an individual in his late fifties. I wondered if he would still be practising given that he would be in his 70’s now. I took a chance and to my surprise, the clinic and the doctor continue to function and the space has not changed a bit in the way it felt and looked.

There were two patients waiting outside and another one consulting the doctor inside. I thought that my turn would come quite quickly. As I sat there waiting, I realised that the doctor was spending a minimum of 30 minutes with each patient. Therefore it was easily more than an hour before I got my chance to meet him. Initially I was amused by how I was transported back to the 90’s in that ambience. My initial excitement was to capture it on my camera. The results of that you can see on the collage. As I clicked my last photo inside the clinic I observed this board that said, please do not use a smartphone half an hour before your eye check up as it will interfere with the test. Looking at this I shut my phone and put it in my pocket. As I sat there without much distraction, I could get back in touch with some feelings of the 90’s. The 90’s before the internet, before smartphones, laptops, social media, e-commerce. A time before capitalism went on steroids. When the game of “Cheat the King” was not so popular. The red oxide floor and the old bulky box television were a rare case of persistence. The rarer one was the doctor himself. The most striking quality of this man was his refusal to conclude till he was truly convinced. He went on looking at my eye through many different scopes that he had in his clinic. He made me look at alphabets of different sizes and read them through many standard lenses. After about half an hour of looking at my eyes he said that the current glasses I was using had lenses of a power that were way too off from what my eyes required. At that moment I recollected the free eye check up in the glossy eye wear shop. That checkup must have lasted about ten minutes before he gave me my prescriptions. I asked the doctor if it is the fault of the way free eye checkups are done in these shops. His response was very cryptic. He smiled and said “Free is Free ”. His smile is the 90’s equivalent of IYKYK. 

I realised that I got cheated at the glossy eyewear shop. The King got cheated and there are no consequences except someone got wealthier. A lot of our economics today is based on the principle of how well you can cheat the customer rather than how well you can serve them. This is the shift that has been enabled by the nexus of technology, internet, ecommerce and social media exploiting the pride in us Kings. All the best for the coming elections (IYKYK)…

More Conversations