Aa okka vishayam meeda kada, nannu lokuvaga choostunnaavu. Aa okka daanito nenu neeku lokuvai poyaanu. Anduke kadara nannu ila treat chestunnavu…
Interspersed with sobs and in a suitably tearful tone of voice. Overheard on the road home. A girl, perhaps a few years younger than me, standing on the roadside, and crying into a mobile phone.
She’d obviously stepped out of office to take the call, and as I passed her, I was reminded of two inane idiots who told me they didn’t mind when I told them I could hear all of their conversations when they used the corridor outside my flat as a phone booth.
It made me wonder about how technology has impacted privacy. God knows we talk a lot about this, but discussions seem to revolve around the protection of privacy rights from the Big Bad State or the Big Bad Corporation: essentially, around protecting our private spaces from interference by ‘public’ entities.
We don’t usually discuss how our fundamental notions of privacy have themselves changed because of technology. Once upon a time, if we were using a public telephone booth, we would shut the door, if there were one, and speak softly so that we couldn’t be overheard. Speaking into a private phone at home, even in front of a room full of family and friends, was still a private conversation. Now, as long as those-we-know can’t see us or hear us, we believe we are private, even if we are in the middle of the street. The fact that complete strangers are privy to intimate conversations does not seem to us like an invasion of privacy (ours or, for that matter, theirs).
And so, as technology makes us more and more self-centred, it also changes the notion of the ‘other’, the one from whom we require protection. Hm.
Translation of italicized paragraph for benefit of international audience:
Note from the translator: This is a translation for which I have not received a permission from the author, completed for purely educational purposes. I have done my best to provide an accurate translation, but take no responsibility for its correctness.Translating poetry is difficult; translating Telugu poetry into any other languages is particularly difficult, because the root of Telugu language is the characters that are symbolic images (not real pictures, but meaningful pictures), whereas all western languages are phonetic notes. The meaning of all western languages is transmitted by sounds only, but that of Telugu is by both images and sounds. Even the sounds have various tonalities, when weaved in the verse, creating a musical and rhythmic feeling that is totally lost in any translation, not to speak of the images that come with the characters.