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THE DIGITAL CONUNDRUM

I knew I had woken up to one of the worst Mondays  when all I could feel were the heat waves welcoming me through the broken window pane of my hostel room. My savior, the ceiling fan seemed not to be in its usual self. My semi-closed eyes and my sleepy body suddenly jump- started to the horror that lay in front of me. The electricity was out which meant ..no fan, and more importantly ..no WiFi !!. , which, if you are a 20th gen or 21st gen homo sapiens, succumbed to the digital overlord, might know the seriousness of. so many things fall out of place, or as Pearl Zhu says,

Today's digital organization is more like an organic living thing, thriving at the expanded ecosystem

I am not a techie expert or an analyst to tell you exactly what Pearl meant but all I knew that I couldn't thrive without electricity. My body unsure of whether to step down from the bed , rolled around like those beef -rolls which Gordon Ramsay made last night, on his YouTube channel .There is this strange thing about social sites, the moment you think of it, the urge to visit the site increases exponentially. Then those gadgets with different shapes, sizes and colors come to our rescue. We are so into this vicious circle of false promises that whenever we pick up a gadget, with a determination to keep it down in 5 minutes we end up being hooked on to our mobiles for the whole day. And , here I am , tapping on my phone , scrolling through videos and notifications , so much that , all I am left with is a pathetic video of a transgender singing " despacito " ( not that I despise transgender-ism...but these are not the videos which one would put on their playlist . ) .My eyes had become sore after all the screen-glaring. It's not that you don't feel like keeping the phone aside, it's just that those vicious hands of lethargy clutch us so tightly that we get addicted to watching people move, on our biscuit screens rather than doing it ourselves. I have seen people with such gigantic levels of addiction that they prefer mobiles over almost everything. I had a cousin from New - York, who preferred carrying mobile -phone to the toilet than a bar of soap ( so very Indian ..when I thought about it ...his preference to using tissues can be yet another reason )

One pattern Which cannot go unnoticed is the fact the with the passing of time, the mobile companies are competing head over heels in making mobile phones thinner and their pockets thicker. I mean, who wouldn't like to carry phones as thin as a paper .....so hot and elitist !!!. Thin and sleek is okay with me but it's the price that makes me flinch. I had always imagined workers cutting pieces from a large chunk of metal in the order of the sizes required..from thick to thin. So based on this theory ..the Einstein in me reached the conclusion that a thin I-phone should be put on a very low price range as compared to a fat windows phone ( old version). I believed in this theory a for a long time until one of my IT friends slapped me out of my dream with those technical aspects ( written on the boxes of the mobile phones ..which I usually pay little attention to ) which I didn't understand a word of. But one thing am sure that my dearest friend wanted to tell me was, the importance of comfortability in deciding the price factor . Well , my kidney was comfortable enough.

Time and again ...my phone keeps on showing me memories ...from long - forgotten years. This is very irritating and it gets worse if you had a shitty past. All the time you spent in getting over some bad memory ...is destroyed when your phone shows you the picture with your ex which you took 2 years ago in the google memories ...and the worst... google makes animations.

On my ride back to my hostel I introspected on how technology has held us captive to its mesmerizing features. We have shifted from being social talkers to social-media talkers, strangers in real life to -friends forever on social media. Last month I had befriended a girl on Facebook, with whom I used to chat . Through her chats, I was almost sure that she had enough confidence to rule all of England. Then came the day when I proposed that we meet someplace to know each other better . Since then I have been blocked by her on all accounts. Well, so much for the confidence. For some strange reason we are afraid to show what we really are ..and thus preferring to show our ' blue -jackal' self to the world, and end up being ruined of the reality. There's a reason why humans have emotions ( or as the Pasteur says " bestowed with),so that they can express them verbally rather than digitalizing it. Emotions expressed through the reaction button and words expressed through Auto-correct are as terrifying and scary as the 'cold- look ' of the robot from the movie ' I - Robot '. We obviously don't want fake - generation somersaulting among the mysterious strings of the social -media dupe that we all happily indulge in. Somewhere or the other we all know that we need to stop this digital-craze but sadly, we are like the stain on a white shirt ..left unwashed for long . How-much-ever we wash ..a speck always remains.

All these thoughts sure ruined me of my view of food stalls on the pavement. A mere look at how they made the chicken - fry made me hungry. For a week, since I didn't step out much, I had to rely on Ramsay for the feeling. Walking towards my room I promised myself that I would shun all my addiction to digital networks. Maybe I would step out a little, go for a jog or write something. With such a newly - found determination, I felt free. I didn't want a lethargic day, after watching a movie overnight, or spending days waiting for someone's message on Whats-app. As I climbed the stairs to my hostel ..two boys sitting on the stairs were laughing at a YouTube video.

"Pity!..wasting away their life !!" Chuckled the new me. The corridors were empty and I could hear the loud screams of joy from the hostel rooms. Something in me stirred ...the hatred towards the digital- Life seemed to have lessened. My phone chimed and vibrated. I had to control and stay put to promises. For me, the popular saying turned out like

"When u don't want something ...the whole world conspires to make u addicted to it ".

My phone vibrated again ..as soon as I entered my room, the WiFi was working again. 850kb/s.....all the messages were shouting out loud as my phone continuously vibrated. I quickly sat on my bed and promised myself strictly ..a 5-minute mobile tour. Well, that was the night that I completed one whole season of " Black-Mirror" on Netflix. The digital overlord had yet again caught me in its clutches.

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SCRIBLANIAC