Innovation is democratizing relationships

On a Sunday morning last month, the neighborhood lady who helps with my quarters' upkeep WeChatted a cheery e-sticker of Dragon Boat Festival greetings. She followed it up with an image of a bag hanging on my door. She didn't want to wake me up. So sweet!

As sweet as the stuff in the bag: glutinous rice dumplings with pieces of dates, wrapped in long leaves and neatly secured with thread.

I'm not a sucker for hyped-up technologies that book-jacket blurbs insist "make a difference", "improve lives", "empower people" and "transform societies". But tech-driven life in Beijing is producing second thoughts.

"Innovation" is making a difference indeed. Apps for instant messaging, digital payments and renting bicycles have not only improved lives but democratized technology, knowledge, services and, I daresay, relationships.

My benefactor is English-challenged, I'm Chinese-challenged, but we communicate via WeChat using the instant translation feature. I pay her using WeChat Wallet.

Apps like WeChat and Alipay facilitate transactions in services, stoke equality and respect, and somehow create the comforting feeling you can still work and live in this world.

This feeling is vastly different from the one generated by previous technologies. For example, TV has quickly degenerated from a means of news, information and entertainment to couch-potato crassness.

When I, an Indian, am able to buy fresh fruits and vegetables - I don't even know the names of some of them - from sellers on pickups at Beijing intersections by simply scanning a QR code, I realize technology has its uses.

That realization gets reinforced every time I, like millions of others, succeed in unlocking a shared bicycle by scanning a QR code.

When I see the support staff and security guards at my office, who are literate but perhaps not highly educated, engrossed in content on their smartphones after a hard day's work, I feel happy for them.

Some of them must be from far-off places. But tech innovation has empowered them. They communicate with their loved ones in real time, almost free of cost, and accomplish a range of transactions with no more than a few fingertip taps, just like me.

I'm now on several WeChat groups, including one comprising fellow Indians in Beijing. We plan potlucks, birthday parties, festivals, weekend getaways, so on, and bond continuously online, which helps banish the blues related to living far away from home.

Thanks to apps, I've befriended strangers like co-passengers. Long-lost schoolmates, now settled worldwide, have reunited virtually, emotionally. The entrepreneurs among them pick my brains on how they could contribute to China.

But apps could be treacherous too. The other day, I bumped into a lovely Chinese woman at Bairong mall. Her beauty evokes respect, peace and inner joy.

By the time we descended a few floors in the elevator, I, full of admiration, mustered enough courage to request her to connect on WeChat. Bemused but not taken aback, she agreed.

WeChat translated her first message in Chinese as "I am without makeup."

Contact the writer at siva@chinadaily.com.cn