When old tech was new

Of car potties and the durian trade

Hola Global Jigsaw,

This weekend, a guest post by former ad man, ace raconteur, and dapper doyen of the Bangalore black tie dinner, Stanley Pinto. Many of us owe Stanley thanks for the weekly bouquet of pointers to news and views, on subjects ranging from wine to mathematics, that he shares with spirited regularity.

In today’s post, Stanley takes us on a journey through new-old technology and its effects, from 1960s Bombay, through to South East Asia in the 1980s.

I hope you enjoy the read. Do share widely, and as always, please upgrade to paid subscriber status, so that this labour of love is also leavened with some financial recompense :-)

When old tech was new

Bombay in the late 1960s. I was a bright-eyed young account executive at an advertising agency called Lintas India. We existed primarily, secondarily and almost solely to service Hindustan Lever, by far the biggest, most stable and then, as it is today, the most proficient marketing company in the country.

In May 1970, Tim Green came to visit India. ‘Tiny’ Tim was the London-based chairman of Lintas Worldwide, the company he had built from a department of Unilever into a 60-country conglomerate.

A lovely man was Tim Green, as slim and delicate as a bamboo shoot. Five foot tall in his socks and barely tipping the scales at 90 pounds, he was our hero. We loved to hear him speak – and he could, at the drop of hat and with a delightful sparkle in his eyes, deliver a 15-minuts peroration on any subject under the sun.

It used to be told that his Number Two would come into Tim’s office every morning, and over the day’s first cuppa, say, “Tim, orchids?” (or ‘botrytis’ or ‘zygote’ or something similar obscure) solely for the pleasure of hearing the great man expand gleefully on the subject.

So, there we were on that balmy May day at Lintas India with Tim holding court. “The 70s are here,” he said, “and there are new technologies lurking in the wings that are going to change our world beyond recognition.”

As an example, he told us about how you could now write something on a piece of paper, slip it into a slot machine, dial a telephone, and the contents of the paper would be transferred via the ether to whatever other similar machine you had dialled, even halfway across the globe!  And that was not all.

Tim also alerted us to  machines that we could place on ours desks that would calculate the most complex 20-digit arithmetic in a nano second. And  about pocket-sized telephones that one could carry around in one’s pocket and whip out anytime, anywhere, to make a call to anybody, anywhere. 

We gasped as one. Whatever will they think of next? Living in an India of unstable telephone lines and antiquated telex machines, this was heady stuff! Fax machines and digital calculators didn’t actually get to us for a few more years, but when they did, they changed our lives monumentally. But not always for the better.

 We couldn’t dodge a furious client any more; he’d send a fax demanding immediate attention. We could no longer plead non-receipt of a brief by post that we’d forgotten about; now they rode in by fax. In fact, the only things that were permitted to be ‘lost in the post’ were clients’ cheques. One client took to faxing us cheques to prove their existence and provenance; then they’d get lost in the post anyway.

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Technology always had a somewhat perverse effect on me. Each new gadget has always terrified me into wanting to know it better, until I’ve got it exactly where I want it: working for me in the most improbably ways.

 In Bangkok, where the traffic was horrific enough for the Japanese to have invented car potties, we had two options. We could leave home at 5.30am and play nine holes of golf before walking into our nearby Sukhumvit Road office, or leave home at 7.00am and spend two vituperative hours in traffic getting to work.

I don’t fancy golf. Hitting a ridiculous little ball and then walking behind it for four hours hitting it again and again is, to my thinking, less than intelligent. So, I slept the two extra hours instead and left for the office at 7.00am when the traffic was in full cry.

But I had a fax machine installed in the car, to work on the messages that had arrived during the night from offices on the other side of the globe. (No, I didn’t need a car potty. I instead took the precaution of identifying three restaurants en route to the office that I could duck into for a comfort break before returning to the car, which had by then moved no more than ten feet away anyway.)

Once in the early 80s, seated at a community table at one of Jakarta’s delightful Padang restaurants, the air came alive with the electric crackle of telecommunication gobbledygook, and the fellow seated across from me suddenly developed a large clump of plastic in his hand, with an aerial sticking out of it. He stuck it to his head and joyfully yelled “hallo”.

Wireless telephony had arrived, and it wasn’t long before trains and trams and buses and restaurants and powder rooms and even churches and mosques all over South-east Asia were bristling with people shrieking “hallo’ into plastic clumps clutched to their ears.

As unlikely at it may seem, South-east Asia took to mobile telephones at least five years before they became commonplace in London or New York. I should know; I travelled between those locations several times a year during those years and saw it for myself. And how profitably those ‘Asian Tigers’, the nom de guerre that the West gave the flourishing Asian countries, put this newfound ability to communicate to work.

In Hongkong, the ‘just in time’ vendor supply system was given an entirely new dimension. The side streets off Nathan Road were clogged by little three-wheeler vans delivering a single refrigerator, TV set, or piece of furniture to a shopkeeper who had called in an order for it to a wholesaler just ten minutes earlier.  The shopkeeper was standing by, sipping a cup of tea with the customer. His inventory costs were non-existent, so he was happy. He shared some of his savings with the customer, so he was happy too. The wholesalers’ sales kept ticking over merrily.

There was happiness everywhere. In Kuala Lumpur, dozens of mom-and-pop noodle shops with newly installed fax machines, prospered from a burgeoning lunch delivery service that developed on the wings of faxed orders received from nearby offices.

Even the unlikely durian trade quintupled all over the region. The durian is a fruit that the Wall Street Journal once famously described as having the taste of heaven and the smell of a sewer. No shop or mall would stock it. It is reported that Garuda Airlines once parked an Airbus out in the open for three days, all doors and escape hatches open, air-conditioners blowing, to get rid of the smell from a bag of durians that an unthinking passenger had brought on board. The passenger was sentenced to six months in the local pokey.

Stinky durian

Until the advent of mobile telephones, aficionados of the durian, whose ranks included prime ministers and presidents and major corporate leaders (and me too), had to drive out miles into the hills to buy and eat it from right under the trees on which it grew.  But now a truckload of durian could enter the city, set up shop in a car park, and replenish stocks several times a day by calling them in on a mobile telephone.

In today’s world of Apple and Samsung smartphones and ChatGPT and and and, all of my memories of the early technological wonders seem so quaintly dated, even to me. But there was a special excitement to being there, on the ground floor, when the revolution was happening; an excitement that today’s evolutionary developments just don’t match.

Stanley Pinto was an international marketing communications professional. He now lives in Bangalore.

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So, do you agree with Stanley’s conclusion? Are today’s technological developments devoid of the excitement of earlier revolutuons? Share your views in the comments section:

That’s it for today, folks. Hasta pronto,

xoxo

Pallavi