The Gray Hair Speaketh

Year 2035: a viewer call on a live program on CNBC-TV18

*This post is in lighter vein*

Let’s visualise a call coming in on a live market analysis program on CNBC TV18, in the year 2035.

Okay, I hear some of you go, “will traditional TV even be around in 2035??”

So, let’s not get into that detail. The doubts about traditional TV’s survival do remain. But for now, indulge me. Let’s assume live TV is still around, let’s assume that TV18 is still around, and in case these are not, then visualise this happening on some equivalent program on some popular web platform, of 2035.

Again, before we jump there, let me give a historical reference:

This video is from Sept 2017, and since it is in Hindi, I will give you a small summary of it. Here on a live business program, a viewer calls in to say that he has some shares that were left behind by his late grandfather, that they are in physical form, and that he wants to sell them. While the experts explain the process to him, only as a matter of fact, the journalist mentions to the viewer that the shares that he has accidentally discovered now, are 20,000 shares of MRF, and which are worth a princely sum of INR 130 crores!!

With this historical background, we now switch to the year 2035, and where there is a similar business program going on, on your favourite business channel.

Year 2035

We have the host, Balaji, and the experts Mr. Kuber and Mr. Cryptic, engaging on the program. Clearly, the program is all about crypto currencies now, as normal stocks and mutual funds have been reduced to a tiny fraction of the investment pie and are traded on small niche exchanges, and there is no discussion program for those, as the interested segment is a very tiny audience. There are a few amongst those who have been holding ITC Ltd shares and have been waiting for the “imminent” rise in its share price, for almost 30 years.

On the program now, Mr. Kuber is commenting how the crypto markets have remained stable last few days, and have seen only a swing of 30% up and down, over the whole of the previous week. As he says, “I guess investors are happy with the current valuation numbers and seeing the currencies settled in the 30% swing range, which should give a lot of comfort to everyone holding these. Compare that to last month, when we were seeing an 80-90% up and down in the prices.”

Just at that moment, the host Balaji interrupts him saying, “we have a live caller, let’s hear from him”

The live caller is Ravi and he says, “Hello, Sirs, I have a question for the experts here. My grandfather had passed away in the 2021 pandemic and left behind a lot of things. We have been busy surviving and slowly figuring out his various assets. Few months back, we had found his iphone and wanted to see if there was anything on it that might be of value.

As it turns out, it was an iphone 11 and since we are now in the iphone 24 era, there is hardly anyone who can open up anything earlier than the iphone 19. So, it took us a long time to find someone who could open and read through the contents of the iphone11.

Finally, as we managed to do this, we saw some reference to some Dogecoins on his phone. We don’t know how to validate them. And whether they are worth anything. “

Mr. Cryptic responds “Ravi, this is a good question. Dogecoins are definitely around, and yours should also be valid. You can just go to the mycrypto app, put in your details, and it will give you a confirmation of their validity as well as their value, if you’d like to know.”

Ravi says, “Okay, give me 1 second to download the app (*my note: at those speeds, app downloads would literally take 1 second only!) and then let me put the details and see.”

Saying so, Ravi quickly downloads the app, while still being on the live call. After doing that, he puts the reference information from his grandfather’s iphone and finds a match. User experience designs have gone up (finally) by 2035, so that the app is intuitive enough to fetch the data quickly and not wait for the user to make 10-15 attempts with different combinations etc.

And Ravi responds back on the program, “Thank you, Sirs. Indeed, the Dogecoin shows that it is very much valid. Thank you for leading me to this app.”

And he adds, “But I think the app is misbehaving? The value that is is showing has far too many zeros. I don’t think this may be correct.”

Mr. Kuber was intrigued. He asks Ravi to share his screenshot, so the experts can understand what is happening. And Ravi finds a way to share his screen.

At which point, Mr. Kuber, Mr. Cryptic and Balaji, all of them, after reading the screen once, after re-reading it to confirm that they were reading it right, screamed wildly and jumped off their respective seats!

Ravi was startled, almost scared. He was not sure what had hit these guys. Was there some virus or something that he had shared via the screenshot that he had shared.

After they regained composure, they screamed back to Ravi, “Ravi, you are one lucky person! You know how much you are worth, thanks to this stray discovery of your grandfather’s iphone??

You are worth, ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!!

You have become India’s richest person! OH MY GOD.. !!”

May 9, 2021 - Posted by Sanjay Mehta | Uncategorized