Fast Generation

As the lasting rays on the autumn sun slowly ebbed away into the chilly night, leaving lazy rays on the upper stories of the high rise buildings in Flatiron District, I hurried my way home, wrapping work. It was a Monday after all, busy, hopelessly pompous of how much needs to be done! And I was just winding up work, already planning what to do next. I knew I had to eat something, maybe catch early dinner or a snack, just enough to keep me going through a workout session at the gym. Lost in my thoughts of what I should do next, I almost gave no thought to the fact that, food itself was an entity, an important activity, an important element that has direct impact with our existence!

An activity which pretty much occupied almost all of our times at one time in the human civilization has now been squeezed to just 30 mins a day.

While walking towards the metro station, I began recalling all the Deli’s that I would cross. I knew there was a Cuban cafe with cheezy pizza on display, a Chop’t outlet offering greens in nicely packaged plastic and a Panera with its standardized food offering. Not in a mood to make any more decisions, I decided to enter into the Panera. I knew what I wanted - a croissant and a yogurt smoothie, filling enough to keep me going. As I entered the chain, I saw standing idly a number of kiosks, lazily displaying images of flattering food. Just a few feet from the kiosk was the empty check out counter, wherein stood a smiling store manager. He smiled as I entered, his smile made me halter for a second. I thought, should I proceed to the kiosk, punch my order or should I head to the counter?

Here I was, making a decision to approach a machine or a human- capable of doing the same task at the almost same efficiency! I stood, blinking at what this little metaphor meant, in the eco-system of where we stand today.

The kiosk stood as a reminder of how we are stripping away human interaction from our lives. The images of food that it shows are not man-made anymore, they are manufactured by hands of machines that are programmed to add the same amount of butter and dough, to make the same pattern, to package in the same manner, same product over and over, one after the other. There was a logical flow of thought of how food is prepared, a logical flow of thought of how food should be ordered- every process broken down into steps, reducing variances, reducing redundancy, reducing anything that spells inefficiency. The machine does not need to greet me, does not need to ask, if I had a good day, does not need to smile at me, nor does the store manager, whose essential task was just to take my order. But more than just taking my order, I interacted with much more than the store manager, I interacted with another person with greying hair, I responded to his mild smile, his quiet manner. I acknowledged his gentle approval of my yogurt smoothie, reveled in the fact that he liked it too.