Mum’s set-top box went on the blink last week.
She lives in Fort Kochi, and I was on a work call in Mumbai, when a cousin who lives in Bengaluru began to call persistently. He is the tech-head every elder in the family turns to when in need. How was I to know he was calling because he needed an OTP?
The OTP expired and we had to start the rather torturous process of trying, across three cities, to prove our authenticity as users and resolve the issue online.
Fixing such issues now involves an app that my 75-year-old mother cannot use on her own. Simply logging in is a challenge. The app demands an email address she did not choose, a user ID she never wrote down, and an OTP that travels all the way here, to my phone in Mumbai.
The whole thing became so complicated, we were soon on a conference call. Her voice was thin with the effort of holding the phone while trying to follow instructions. As my cousin guided her through the menu options on the set-top box, I hunted for her user ID. As time ticked on and our early attempts failed, all three of us began to sound exasperated.
When the TV finally flickered back to life, the relief in mum’s voice was mixed with other emotions: frustration at being forced to call us during our work hours; embarrassment at being unable to deal with an everyday issue; and a quiet anger at a world that has become so unrecognisable, it has forced her into this position of dependence.
I celebrate Digital India because, when I was growing up, it would have taken three visits to a company or government office just to lodge the complaint about the set-top box. My kids and I enjoy the frictionless-ness of being able to complete almost any such task in under 90 seconds.
As that frail voice of hers came over the phone, though, I allowed myself to feel how frightening and alienating all this must be for her. So much now involves an OTP, a “quick” online form or new user registration: the Special Intensive Revision exercise, renewing a passport, ordering a gas cylinder, getting the TV back on.
Hers is a generation that prided themselves on buying their own homes, building up their savings, caring for their nuclear families. How lonely must it be to suddenly feel like one is outside it all, unable to type the OTP in quickly enough; seeing the timer run down and knowing one must now start all over again, while impatient younger relatives wait on the line for you to get it right.
Each failed attempt must feel like a small humiliation.
Nandita Abraham, a dean at the BITS Design School, puts it plainly: “It is the role of a designer to design for people who are 75 or older. This applies to how many seconds an OTP is given, or what happens when an older person has to log into an app under pressure and cannot remember their password. The designer has to know all the people they are designing for, and account for them in the system.”
Sadly, that isn’t how the world works. The systems that govern my mother’s set-top box, bank account and electricity bill were built by people who, like most young people, seem to think they will never feel 75, or struggle with what anxiety can do to memory under a ticking clock. They think, as most of us do, that we will never know the loneliness of needing something urgently and having to turn to busy younger people, far away, for help.
We have allowed technology to redefine competence, relevance and care, in ways that — when one looks at them closely — are quite brutal.
In Kochi, the set-top box works again. When it freezes next, the cycle will repeat.
The world will not slow down. All we can do is choose whether the people who raised us are left standing on the edges of it all, or whether we can make room for them too.
That choice, more than any app update, is the upgrade that matters.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)
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