A House of Cards

This morning I thought for going for a walk after a very long time. I simply came out of my house before it could go for another round of nap and in the process I left my purse and mobile behind. Not a big deal after all I was not going for shopping. But while I was starting my bike to go to the nearby play ground I realised that my driving licence has been left in the purse at my home. Suddenly, I started thinking then that I didn't have even my identity cards and then I realised that I had already started feeling uncomfortable. In this mega city I am an unknown person a person without identity, only because I don’t have any identity card.

While walking I was having multiple worries. If the traffic police asks for the driving licence on the next corner, if suddenly something goes wrong and I land up in hospital. I hardly know anybody around, nobody knows me in this big-city. Having left my purse behind I have no identity and simultaneously I have no means to make any kind of payments, no cash and no cards even I can’t make a call. I was feeling even more uncomfortable now; one card allows me to ride my bike another permits me to drive the car, here is my quarterly railway pass which permits me to board the local train every day to my office. There is another identity card which permits me to enter into my office still it is better than those cards people wear around their neck in most of the offices nowadays and this is very common in all the ministries. There are multiple debit and credit cards to confuse our financial life in addition to the PAN Card and the TAN Card. There are other health check cards and not to forget cards from each of the shops where you keep making purchases and your purchase points keep getting accumulated. Then I started thinking of the Club card, Gym card, Health Card issued by hospitals, my own CGHS card, Railway pre-paid card, Airlines preferred customer card, voter’s identity card, Aadhar card, Pre-paid and post paid mobile cards, Pink Card, Yellow Card, Red Card, Green Card, Poverty Card, Ration Card and there are now Gold, Silver and Platinum Cards to measure as to how rich you are and as to how big your status is? It is simply a never ending stream of cards in our life.

I was wondering who is using whom; whether we are using these cards for our own comfort or this system is using various cards to regulate us humans. It had become now a real nightmare both to manage these cards and also to manage life without these cards. In any developed system; consolidation and convergence of information of stake holders is the requirement of the day. But, what is happening that this world has become very complex with so many cards floating around to make our life even far more complex. This system of issuing cards, at the drop of the hat, is certainly is not human centric rather these cards are being issued for the benefit of a particular system used by us humans; this is the system centric.

It is high time now to think for only one card having all the details of a particular person which could be used to update the database of the particular system that the person is using. Similarly now the technology has improved to the extent that even the card carried by the person could store the updated new information and may be our lives could be simpler without these hundreds of cards. But if that single card is lost then what; let our system be built around us human beings where his or her presence itself replaces the requirements of all the cards. Are we ready for it?