3 Random Things - Week 13

"There are no free lunches!!"

The first time I heard this was at the Woodlands Restaurant near my school. My school started at 7 in the morning and would finish by 1. One particular day, I was grabbing a quick lunch after school, before tuition. As I was finishing my lunch, in walks my crush with her dad. They didn't even notice I was there.

So, I panicked, gulped down whatever was on my plate, washed my hands and raced to the exit door. And that was when I felt a tap on my shoulder and the aforementioned dialogue. By the way, they noticed that.

As I have trudged through another twenty years of life, I have never heard that dialogue again. But like in each of Aesop's fables, across varies situations in life, I have realised that this was lesson to be learnt.

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1. Why is your email free?

I felt like going back to 2012 - the year the world was supposed to end. So, I set a year filter on my email and took a ride back in time. And that's when I remembered that I was part of the generation which forwarded an email to ten people to avoid bad luck. Cringey? Wait till the post where I tell you what I found on Facebook (or what went to the grave with Orkut).

Anyways, it got me thinking. Why would a company pay a considerable amount of money to upkeep the data on servers around the world, so that I can read the nonsensical email that I sent a decade ago?

Well, alongwith every waste email, I'm giving them access to everything I'm doing. They might say (and they might actually) not read the email, but they do read where I got the mail from, and maybe the subject line. That's enough data.

For example, if I get a mail saying my car loan is sanctioned, they can use it to show me advertisements of car keys. And not just any car keys, car keys related to my favourite football club. And how do they know which my favourite football club is? Well, I hope you guessed that.

2. Capturing the market

The market, according to marketing teams, are pretty easy to manipulate. Unfortunately, us, the market, keep proving them right time and again. Again going back to 2012 and coming back, the major "disruptors" in all fields - think food delivery, can service, digital wallets, mobile services - they all seem to have one thing in common. They come in with a bucketload of freebies, make us get used to a certain way of life, and then start charging us living our life in the manner that they have dictated.

Is this life more comfortable and easier? Yes. Yes, it is. However, it's costlier too. So the next time someone offers you something for free, just think about how you would feel paying for it a few years later.

3. Electoral Bonds

I'm no expert on the subject. People far more intelligent have written and spoken about it. For your sake, I hope you make an effort to go through this topic.

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A nomadic thought visited me whole writing this. What was the last invention/advancement which made the human race go "WOW!!!". Pretty much everything that are being done today have been fictionally created but authors decades ago. Personally, I am rooting for a conveniently compartmentalized time control apparatus. As with any time machine, you don't want the entire timeline to go back or forth - that would be like skipping to the end of the movie.

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So, that's all for this week then.

Have a great weekend!!

'til next week.