19-year old Akash is a GPS addict. He is heading for the airport when I speak with him, flying back to Mumbai after a month-long summer training program in Delhi. He does not know which terminal his flight departs from. So he plans to find his way to the correct one using GPS on his phone. His friends joke about how he probably uses GPS to navigate to the loo!
“You come to an unknown city. You don’t know anyone or anything. What are you supposed to do?” he asks. Enter his expensive $700 Nokia N95 phone with GPS. Except that he spends most of his time in Mumbai, his hometown which he knows rather well. And he tells me that he is not much of a traveller either. So what’s with the GPS fascination?
He tells me of this time that his dad and he were in a central market in Delhi, and his dad suddenly felt like digging into a burger. “So I just pulled out my phone and searched for burger joints, and sure enough, found one within a kilometre of where we were”. This apparently happens often back in Mumbai, when he is out with his friends. He is the official navigator, the ringleader who guides the fun to the closest happening restaurant or hangout with his GPS!
So why not just stop and ask for directions, I wonder… But for Akash, that is out of the question. He can barely even imagine such a scenario. It is the natural state of affairs for him to know his way around. Stopping, pausing, wondering, depending on cabbies, all out of the question. He wants to go where he wants to go, when he wants to go there. No pauses, no stops, no uncertainty, no hesitation. That is what technology does for him, is supposed to do for him. That is what his phone does for him. Make him feel like Mr.Cool, completely in charge of his fun, his life.
The most interesting part of the story suddenly emerges into the light. It is not about just the GPS either. The GPS represents this larger concept that he simply calls “Tech Savvy”. In addition to GPS, he also thrives on phone’s 8 gig memory storage, a 5 mp camera, 3G capabilities, HSDPA (the last two only enjoyed on holiday overseas, since India has not yet moved to 3G). He stores movies on it, and watches them by plugging the phone into a TV. He surfs the net through the phone, blogging and connecting with an astonishing number of communities on Orkut (nearly 100, he tells me).
He lets it out very casually, almost matter-of-factly, but with a quiet, unmistakable sense of pride - a GPS + 5 mp + 8 GB + blah blah phone in one pocket, a 20 GB pen drive (he has a 20 GIG pen drive!!!) in the other, an HP notebook in his backpack, and he feels “Tech Savvy”. His expression says it all: he feels Uber-cool, Empowered, Unstoppable, ‘With-it’.
Even as he has to rush off to catch his flight, he calls out, “oh, one thing I forgot to mention. I also use it as a pen drive. Transfer presentations quickly to my laptop.” This from a guy with a 20-gig pen drive in his pocket!
Opportunity: Put him in charge. Give him the controls. To fun. To life. To technology.
Post author: Sai Raghavan
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