The Vagabond

Together

Turn your neck around, and you see people with their necks flexed, typing into their smartphones!

Go to a restaurant, you will find people glued to their mobile screens rather than conversing!

Kids as small as age 1, will cry for the I pads rather than anything else!

Our generation has definitely become a slave to the technology.

15 years back, when I had graduated from Medical school, the first mobile phone was from the hard earned meagrely stipend. Today my son, demands a smartphone that too best in the market when he will be in Class 9.

Possibly ours was the last generation who knew how to enjoy without the smartphones. Though, slowly it seems we too are losing the grasp.

Gone are the days of beautiful handwritten  letters, Archies greeting cards, roses and teddy bears. If today someone has to propose, he/she will do it on What’s app or FACEBOOK. Someone rightly suggested, Had this been Pre Independence Era…People would just post a message saying Share it so much that It reaches Brits and they leave India.

This sharing  and forwarding business is so rampant that people don’t even check the authenticity of what they share. Most hilarious of all is the one concerning Bhagat Singh’s Hanging and 14th Feb. Each year right before the Valentine, so called secular patriots will bombard What’s App and FB with those messages.

Jokes Apart, It’s disheartening to see all in a family sitting together with their mini computers in hand  and a pin drop silence broken only by a video played by somebody.

When orkut and facebook were launched in 2004, it was a breakthrough. We could meet online friends we had lost in the course of growing up. But still at that time, you had to log in to your computer and because of high rates, slow internet speeds..everything was still in limits. But then came the touchscreens and with them the facebook mobile and what’s app which became popular by 2011- 12 and that has brought its own sets of worries.

While we could converse and be in touch with our distant cousins, long lost friends, what disappeared from our lives has been the intimacy and close conversations with the very people we share our lives with.

I could never understand why the mobile phone was the first thing my husband wanted to check in the morning. Ever since my dad got his laptop, my mother cannot understand why he has to play candy crush every few hours. Possibly this is what is Mobile addiction.  You go to malls and find kids as small as 9 months hooked in their prams to the Ipad screens. Probably I pad is the first word they learn these days.

Among many of the couples, when one of the spouses gets hooked to his mobile phone, the other feels neglected. At times a situation like ” Please keep your phone down and talk to me” comes. There are couples who feel more comfortable chatting to each other rather than talking face to face. All this is a red signal, an alarming situation which need immediate attention. For a couple face to face talk and physical touch is very essential. For growing up Kids, they will be much more complete beings if we spend time with them rather than the smartphones.

It’s time to ponder whether we want to use smartphones or smartphones use us.

Whether we want to stay alone with our smartphones or together in a family!