There is nothing utilitarian, appropriate and elegant to wear on a wrist than a watch. By common acknowledgment, a wrist watch is considered to be the most precise and best engineered thing in micro-engineering. For the price of a dinner for two, a wrist watch has the simplicity of looks, the complexity of movement and the unity of operation.
A wrist watch, which in this context must be a mechanical watch (either an automatic or manual watch), has a complicated set of cogs, gears, wheels, barrels, bridges, springs, etc. These are powered by a mechanism (hence its name) to measure time. This mechanism includes a winding spring that keeps and then slowly releases the energy needed to power the watch. Instead of a digital display, it will always have a traditional dial (the face covered with a transparent glass or plastic) with a set of hands, two or three of them, to indicate the hour, minutes and sometimes the seconds on the watch. A smart watch has none of the above. While it tells time, it is not a watch anymore that a television, radio, vehicle dashboard, cellphone, etc, are not watches, although they all tell time. Small wonder that those who who are confident enough to treat an accessory of the arm as if it were an accessory of the head - the ear ring - which is typically worn on both ear lobes, sometimes wear a wrist watch on one wrist while they simultaneously wear their smart watch on the other wrist. They know or ought to know that despite this, they are really wearing only one watch!
Right now, Google’s renown lies in its reputation as the world’s foremost and most reliable search engine on the Internet. Critics may complain that this is bad for competition and also that it limits a user’s choice of internet searches. Although it is often a cliche, that is just the way the cookie crumbles, sometimes. But we still have to acknowledge Google’s impact and relevance in reinventing how to search for things and words online and challenging what it means to look up things and words on the internet. For much of contemporary history, searching for anything knowledgeable reflected a rigid and outdated motion of asking a knowledgeable person (a teacher or a librarian or an expert) or looking it up in a book (a dictionary, or a textbook, or an encyclopedia.) But as we advanced in technology and more and more sources of knowledge became available, search engines became indispensable because they tended to collate all the information we needed in one place. But a search engine, even a hallowed one, is not a library or a reference book. So from time to time, it will get it wrong. Witness how search engines erroneously ascribed the expression that England and America are two countries separated by a common language. There is no definitive or generally acknowledged source for this joke which, by the way, also doubles as a linguistic contradiction: people and things may be united by a common feature, such as a language, culture, border, etc.. They are never separated by a common thing! Yet Google variously attributes the aphorism to Winston S Churchill. Some search engines ascribe it to George B Shaw or Oscar Wilde, both of whom, including Churchill, are renowned for witty aphorisms. It may be cute to ascribe this aphorism to these observant men, but it is factually incorrect even when broadcast by search engines.
In Molepolole, where urban legends and off-kilter anecdotes about lightning and witches abound, the topography is flat, undulating and plain. Its people, (I am one of them), appear to care less about these legends and topography. But now, with the advent of online overexposure almost everybody has discovered or heard or overheard something about Molepolole so significant as to want to talk about or comment on or share it with others. Much of the talk or comment is about the simple, everyday things that may disturb or amuse those unfamiliar with the place: the homicides rates, its large population, its sprawl, the absurdity of its pubs located on the main highway, etc. I always wonder what we could learn about Molepolole, if we stepped back to consider the messiness, energy, and thrum of the place. This we could do through observations that penetrate deepest, indeed the ones that strike at one's personal core. This way we would see how the dullness and closeness and disorganization of Molepolole are all comforting; how the un-dramatic character of its landscape is not possessed by other large places, and how, despite its underdevelopment that aches us, it is still a livable and welcoming place. Impressionably, those who do not know Molepolole are often more sincere about their ignorance of it. Those who know it typically are not. Despite its grim realities, Molepolole is an ordinary place. It is not a village in the conventional sense, nor is it a town, or a city or even a township. There are laws designating these statuses and Molepolole, possibly for good reasons, has not been so designated. With places, it is true that the same thing never happens twice. But the same things do: populations increase, murders occur, lightning strikes, ordinary lives are lived, etc. That is how urban legends about Molepolole have come about. That is, they claim not to capture the essence of Molepolole but simply to denote some kind of so-called remarkable traits about it. Yet whatever they say about it, or whatever they may think about it, in a sense they are helping Molepolole to evolve into more than an ordinary place but into a state of mind, of deflection and of self-criticism by its people.
Happy holidays.
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor
