Hey, got signal?

I got off a plane in New York recently and I told myself, I have got off a plane in New York, this is 2010 and I must do something state-of-the-art and hip and cool because I've got off this plane

I got off a plane in New York recently and I told myself, I have got off a plane in New York, this is 2010 and I must do something state-of-the-art and hip and cool because I've got off this plane. In New York. So I pulled out my Blackberry, no acknowledgement to the fact that I had landed 10,000 miles away from Mumbai in a new place and immediately, there within my phone, was a familiar world. A world that negated distances and rendered places meaningless. By which I mean, I could get the latest news from Indian papers or the New York Times, Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, sms about life, meetings, conversations, plans, things I had missed, to and from my New York friends and everywhere else. I was connected to the world like I had never left. I was so cool. Breezing out of the airport, one light bag in a city I knew reasonably, Blackberry in hand, such a busy person and so comfortably assimilating into world cities in seconds. I thought to myself, I look like those business guys in cologne ads. Then something happened that made all this coolness meet reality. I fell into a ditch. And it served me right.

It wasn't a traditional ditch like a huge one in '80s Calcutta that showed up overnight without reason; it was clearly marked with bright sensible signs and dividers, which I would have noticed if I looked up. And acknowledged that after 22 hours, I was in a new place with new things. "Hey fela, Blackberry, was it?" said a large Italian American man one only finds near New York airports and in Scorsese movies. "Happened four times today," he added.

A connected world is a brilliant thing surely for work and commerce and speed. Documents, money, ideas, appointments, travel from Sydney to San Francisco in seconds and it's made us efficient and in-touch and extend into the world. But it's also made us the same.

I remember my first trip to London in the late '70s, a child of Calcutta's then decaying infrastructure, a town of ambassadors and going abroad frowned upon (except to leave for good), landing at Heathrow and it feeling like the Starship Enterprise. The motorways, the cold, the cars, the city, the taller people, the jackets, alien hoardings, alien TV, celebrities I didn't know, felt so entirely different that the word "foreign" had some value.

Along the way, we became a different country, the world got connected, jumping to London and New York for a certain urban set became a burden than a wondrous journey (like my first London one) and when I got off that plane in New York, I realised, it was not just me being a show-offy nincompoop; everyone had pulled out their iPhones and Blackberries and communicators and treated the new place as if nothing had happened. As if this new place was not a new place at all. Just a transition into somewhere else, equally familiar. It could be Delhi, Durban, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo or LA ufffd the fashions (Prada, Armani, Tag Heuer), the friends (Facebook, Twitter), the lingo (sms text), the entertainment (YouTube, the latest Hollywood ufffd Sex and The City 9, Iron Man 27), the technology (Apple), the information (whichever news websites), the hotels (Hyatt, Hilton, Westin), the drinks (Single Malts) were all one big homogenised culture. It did not matter if one sat at a roof in a South Mumbai bar or South Moscow ufffd everyone looked, talked, acted the same. At one level, this creates an excellent familiarity ufffd.u00a0 at another, it leaves nothing unique. And all that's left is falling into a ditch to remind you that something is different when you are so far from home.

This week, the TV show Lost (also a product of this global culture) ended after many seasons because the show's creators said: "We just ran out of places in the world where people could get lost in."

A photographer for National Geographic who spends his life searching for untouched remote places in the world told me this anecdote:
He got off a small sea-plane off the coast of New Zealand on an island called Jane (found by a woman called Jane who lived there with 2,000 others) and it was gorgeous, and untouched and blue and tree-filled. Except the first things his co-passengers said when getting off the plane was not, "Look how fantastic" but "I have signal. I am home".u00a0

Today, home is not a place, nor is it where the heart is. It's where the signal is.

Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and The President is Coming. Reach him at www.anuvabpal.com