Thursday, February 26, 2015

Day 34 : Look Up From Your Mobile Screens


My daily commute to work my favorite part of the day.

I travel by train for thirty minutes to reach office. There is a lot disruptive internet connection along the way so I turn off the mobile data. This in turn gives me half an hour of social media black hole. No Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, more importantly no WhatsApp. Darn there are way too many groups and people online everywhere, leading to a bunch of useless notifications propping every few seconds. And as much as I try not to, I do end up unlocking and checking the notifications out of habit to see if anything has come up in my direction. For me it has become like a second nature now. It’s a disease.

There was this really awesome video on this - 'Look Up.' A spoken word film for an online generation

This was a hard hitting video on how our online presence in social media is damaging this generation's interpersonal skills. Inevitable went on to become viral in YouTube, Facebook and all the other social networking sites. The sites that played villain in this film. Humph, ironic.

Anyways, coming back to talk about today's train ride. I was as usual sitting there with a song (Rahman’s) blasting away in my earplugs, idly watching out the window to the buildings and roads running past by the railroad tracks. Soon got bored of it, and turned my head into the compartment for another of my favorite daytime pastime; people watching.

Almost everyone in the train had the earplugs on. Almost everyone had their heads bowed down in utmost reverence to the little rectangular idol spurting light and words like LOL and ROFL and GFY. Some people I could see were mating little images of candies to each other on their Candy Crush apps, quite obsessively. Some were watching TV shows or movies on their mobiles, which I personally feel is a grave insult movies were not made to be watched on such a small screen.

The crowd that made me feel most uneasy was a bunch of college kids. There were nine of them. I could easily make out that four of them were a thing, as in GF/BF, and then there were three other guys and two girls who by their looks of uncomforted were naturally the third wheels of this group.



The thing that made me uneasy was not disparity in their amorous equality; it was their lack of attention to each other. The third wheels naturally were doing something of their own to occupy their time. This mostly should include pulling each other’s legs, especially the couples, raunchy jests at their professor’s expense, the like. But here, they were all also bowed down to their mobile screens. Yes, there was always someone saying something and the rest listening or at least pretending to. I am sure no one had any idea what the whole conversation was about.

The couples were no better, one pair had a girl who was shopping for something on the Flipkart app while the guy who had been trying to say something to her, soon gave up and plugged his earpiece and started watching out the window. In the whole group the other couple were the only people that showed some potential, sure they played that Surfer game for a bit but at least they were doing it together.

Now I think I hated seeing them. Their lack of friendship. I'd like to think that it was just one of those days when they all had something to do than spend time with each other. But when I sit and think of the things that they felt were so important than spending time with each other, I feel queasy. Come on, you can always play that stupid game when you’re alone. Is it that important to do it right now?!

I don’t think I have any right to accuse them of anything when I’ve done that so many times myself, especially at home when there is a stupid movie going on. Movie watching has always been the family-time in my household. I sort of see it slipping away.

I believe Gary Turk did mean something by that video. I think we are all going down a very troublesome road.

Today, I plan to shut off the notifications on my mobile. And hope to keep my hands off of it more each day.

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