NaBloPoMo Day 11 : What Are We Turning into?

A few days ago, traveling by a city bus after long, I was struck by the fact that most of the young people had plugged earphones into their mobiles and were either talking to someone, or listening to music. In the middle of that bundle of humanity within the bus, each was lost in her or his own universe.

In college I notice students reaching for their phones the minute they step out of the classroom or the lab, hurriedly trying to hide it from the view of a teacher who passes by. Suddenly, this tiny little device has become a lifeline to the thrill that was supposed to arise unaided during this exhilarating period of life.

As I walk in the park, I see youngsters relaxing on the benches, in the companionable silence that comes from each one in an almost meditative trance, lost in enjoying the sensations emanating from his or her mobile phone.

Visit some national monument, or a popular public place, the movie multiplex, the shopping mall or even the temple, and you are sure to chance on people more interested in clicking selfies on their phones than in experiencing the beauty of where they are and what they’re doing.

I’ve written about this before (towards the end of this post), and although it’s been more than a year since that, I l find it saddens me just as much.

I’m all for using our mobile phones to make daily life easy – paying bills, booking tickets, ordering food, shopping, communicating with people, working from remote locations, sharing things with the world etc etc. But when our youngsters become inseparable from their phones, feel lost without them, and suffer withdrawal symptoms when they have to exit their virtual world, it indicates a severe malaise of being unequipped to cope with the realities of the actual world.

This image aptly conveys our situation today. However, the quote is wrongly attributed. It was not said by Albert Einstein, but appeared in a 1995 movie called Powder.