Technology - with a twist

The story of how technology added zing to the world’s oldest Bollywood plot…

Not knowing big names in Bollywood can be quite a problem - especially when you have a brilliant idea and can't see it come to life on the big screen. Like a sequel to a lost and found story - with a twist of course.

It has three brothers who get lost because of technology and in the end, it’s technology that brings them together. It begins with the father - on the run from a gang of goons - messaging his wife, asking her to check her inbox. He had sent a mail, giving her directions to meet him at the neighbourhood park and take care of their three sons until he returned. Unfortunately, the mail gets into the spam folder because he unintentionally mails it to his girlfriends as well. And his wife doesn’t see it.

The father, after hours of waiting in the park, finally sets out to look for the mother. To make sure that the kids didn't disturb the couples there, he gives the three brothers an iPhone, an iPod and an iPad respectively. As fate would have it, the iPhone has no signal, the iPod has no songs and the iPad has no flash support, so the three brothers go in search of the missing elements in their lives and are duly lost.

The passage of time is shown by a download in progress. Once it reaches 100%, we dissolve to the present. One of the brothers decides to look for his siblings and begins tweeting, using the Twitter handle @luk4akbr_antny. To his surprise, he gets a response from a stranger tweeting as @luk4amr_antny. Could this be the second brother? Now, all he needed to do was find the person with the Twitter handle @luk4amr_akbr and the family would be together again.

Meanwhile, the second brother is doing his own search. He records the family song and makes it go viral on YouTube. The good news is that he gets a billion views. The bad news is PSY and Justin Bieber had more hits, but they couldn’t be his long-lost brothers.

Finally, the youngest brother tries using Instagram to locate his brothers. An image with the hashtag #oldhouse keeps popping up - it is his old house where he had stayed with his brothers. He also sees an image of a park with the hashtag #linkinpark – this park would be the vital link as all three brothers separated here.

He switches on Google maps and after a long adventure, which involves a couple of romantic duets and a fight, finds the park. The couples he saw on that fateful day are still there, but there’s no sign of his brothers. Another dead end. Not willing to give up, he gets on to Google. It is Brother's Day and to celebrate it, the Google doodle shows three brothers on a specially made cycle for three. This had to be a sign! He uploads a photo of his tattoo on Google+. Within an hour, he gets three responses, one from a corporate professional with a LinkedIn profile, the second from a Casanova with a Lavalife profile and the third from a jobless youth with a Facebook profile.

The youngest brother is puzzled - he was expecting just two responses. Who was the third? He calls all of them to the park. That's where he figures that the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles belong to his brothers. The Casanova turns out to be his Dad. 

The goons land up, there’s a big fight, the brothers win and the family song plays in the background as all of them happily connect with one another through the Family Tree app on Facebook. 

I love this game, but…

Technology has done so much to improve the game of cricket, and yet…

"I love this game, but it’s never-ending! There's only so much that one can take."

That was the world's first recorded crib on cricket from a fan who tottered out of the stadium in Kingsmead, Durban. It was the 14th of March, 1939, the scene of the Timeless Test between England and South Africa that had gone on for 10 days - and still ended up being a draw.

Unfortunately, economists and world leaders outside of the three and half cricket-playing nations had little interest in the game, otherwise they would have found the actual cause for the Great Depression - years of zero productivity because the crowds were forever watching cricket. And the matches were simply not showing any signs of getting over.

As always, the wise men got into their huddle and decided that the only way to end the depression was to change the way cricket was played. Test cricket was soon limited to five days. However, while this reduced the duration of the game, it did little to help overcome the financial shortcomings. The wise men returned for another innings.

This time around, they decided to use technology to change the way cricket was watched. Radio commentary began and soon cricket was televised - a new channel for earning revenue had opened up. Meanwhile, the game continued to get shorter - one day cricket was introduced and a couple of decades later, the more abbreviated version, T20 would revolutionise world cricket.

Technology soon added video replays - and a third umpire, to review decisions. Dizzy camera angles gave exciting new perspectives to the game, from the bird's eye view through cameras attached to blimps, to the worm's eye view provided by stump vision. The five-day action that was speeded up to last a little over three hours in a T20 game was also slowed down to 1000 frames a second to capture every nuance of the game and every tiny strand of nasal hair that quivered in synch with the background music when a fast bowler thundered in to deliver.

Ball tracking technology brought in Hawk-Eye to find out if the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps. Hot spot left the umpire in a tight spot in case he had wrongly given a batsman out lbw despite the bat making contact with the ball.  Snickometer revealed if the batsman had edged a ball to the keeper. Dazzling graphics packages helped draw manhattans, worms and wagon wheels that could be superimposed on the field. Both stumps and key players were 'wired' with mikes to catch more of what was happening on the field.

Websites began to cover the game, live commentary online ensured that office productivity went from dismal to abysmal and live streaming ensured that fans could become couch potatoes even at the workplace.  Sirji and 3G ensured that the game could be followed on the mobile as well. YouTube had zillions of hours of footage for cricket buffs to prove their point in an argument. Blogs turned millions of fans into cricket scribes while social networking sites turned them into selectors, commentators and critics.

Thanks to technology, the mobile, the computer and the TV now covered every game played, from Australia vs England to Awesome Adyars vs Enigmatic Egatturs. Each game was short and crisp, just about the duration of a three-hour commercial flick. The wise men approached the cricket fan. Now there surely couldn't be any cribs - everything had been sorted out. They asked him. He looked at them bleary-eyed.

"I love this game, but it’s never-ending! There's only so much that one can take."