Which little boy could resist such a story? A young prince, in disguise, was fleeing over range after range of the highest mountains in the world, away from his gold-roofed palace in the shadow of the snowcaps, towards the freedom of the plains. Soldiers from an invading army were in fierce pursuit. Every night, as my parents and I turned on the wireless in the last days before television – March 1959 – a scratchy broadcast would crackle out from the BBC announcer saying that now the young ruler (a monk, to boot) was a little closer to a new life, and now his pursuers were closing in on him. Watchfires of the invading troops could be seen nearby and planes (friendly or malign?) were sometimes spotted overhead.

I own gizmos, lots of them, and have been deeply involved with technology since my childhood. I’ve sold, programmed, gamed on and constructed computers. I have also studied them: prior to becoming a psychiatrist, I was an engineer. Even before I knew Id from Ego, it was blatantly obvious that technology affected people in deep ways – ways that we had little understanding of. It has been about 30 years since the personal computer was widely introduced into people’s lives – 30 years of a grand social experiment, now in almost every society across the globe. And yet, we still have but a crude understanding of how technology impacts people. What does it do to their relationships, to their sense of self? Since I became a physician more than a decade ago, I’ve been interested in that question.

As I write, police in the Indian state of Orissa are searching for the bodies of their comrades in a mountain reservoir. The dead are among 37 members of an elite counter-insurgency unit missing after Maoist rebels strafed and sank a police launch. Hundreds of police and paramilitary troops supported by helicopters are now combing the surrounding forests for the guerillas who carried out the attack. It could be a scene from any one of a dozen films set during the Vietnam or Algerian wars. But it is a slice of real life in a large swathe of India that little resembles the shining, modernising, booming, English-speaking entity celebrated by magazine cover stories and books with titles such as Planet India and Think India.

Many people, including marginalised Jews, do not appreciate that central to Jewish life in Britain, and indeed throughout the world, is the concern for the state of Israel and its perception of threats against its existence. For Jews of my generation, the two major events of the last two millennia were the Holocaust and the creation of Jewish sovereignty in its ancient homeland. They were viewed not in a political but in a religious perspective. The Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel described in his autobiographical work Night a public execution in the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Someone asked the name of the victim dangling from the noose, and the answer was a bellowing cry from one of the inmates: “God!”

The past often acquires a golden glow. On closer inspection, the golden glow usually turns to rust: the old reality turns out to have been just as banal and boring as the present one. But occasionally, things in the past actually were better than they are in the present. One example is ITV, the biggest and oldest commercial television station in Britain.