The iPod is the biggest thing to happen after the Walkman/Diskman. First it was its sheer (small) size, now it is its smart features that make the instrument a Facebook generation must-have. The iPod (classic version 160GB) has made it possible to carry up to 40,000 songs in your pocket. But the question is, who the hell has the capacity to listen to 40,000 different songs? You need more than a lifetime to listen to that many songs. Apple doesn’t even have half the number on iTunes from where you can download songs, legally speaking.

I question Steve Jobs, the man behind this ‘madness of virtual memory’ in his baby. But as a man ahead of his times, there must be a method in his madness.

Creating one hypothetical situation, like all scientists do to explain everything out of this world, I would like to examine the life of the perfect iPod customer as targeted by Mr. Jobs.

If God sends down a very determined nerd with a full memory of a 160GB iPod, he has to live 110 years and hear one new song every day to listen to all of them; never mind that he’ll have to be plugged in right after he is plugged out from the umbilical chord. He’ll be a walking-talking music station, 24x7; a world wide web of music personified.

Imagine his taste of music that’ll cut across continents and cultures. He’ll be waking up to the strumming of the Japanese Biwa, breaking fast with the Russian Opera, lunching with Mariachi band, sipping tea with Vivaldi, dining with death metal and sleeping with Mariah Carey, you know what I mean.

The ‘generation now’, as Black Eyed Peas calls them, is but an infant of what we are talking about. We already have the traits of the future iPod maniacs, much to the disgust of older generation.

Bob Dylan is disgusted by the present iPod sporting youths, so tuned out to real life. But I have already dealt with that in my previous column. Was he mocking us or is he just getting cranky, like every one does with age,’ I had wondered!

We aren’t dealing with Dylan here, but the ever changing Time (‘the slow one now may later be fast and the order is rapidly fading’, slogan) doesn’t change our fetish for music on the move.

Whether it means carrying a tape recorder on your shoulders or sporting the Walkman or the iPod, only one thing has changed, and that is technology. One instrument has killed the other only to be stabbed by another. What Jobs has tried to do is make the ultimate music-storing and listening machine that would outlast anything that we have seen before; giving the iPod enough memory to playback the songs from any age with the slide of a finger.