The Weekend Rigmarole

I write after a long hiatus of ~ 8 years. It isn’t that I haven’t given a thought to writing in these 8 years, let me just put it this way, “there wasn’t too much to write about which wasn’t already being discussed on the internet”. With all the “noise” that surrounds us these days on social media, the good old blogs have lost relevance. Everything has become smaller – our gadgets have reduced in size; our homes have become more compact and so has our attention span. Drawing a parallel from Cricket: it’s the T-20 version (Twitter, Snapchat) which has become the apple of the eye and the good old test match (blogs, articles, Op-Eds etc.) is losing its sheen. Nevertheless, I want to take a plunge today.

I had the pleasure of going on a leisurely evening drive along with my father-in-law and the missus today. (I am visiting my in-laws). We saw lots of countryside during the 2-hour drive and absorbed the beauty as much as we could. We saw young kids playing in the fields, animals wander carefree in their natural habitat, local village folks sitting outside their homes and chatting. It seemed we were in a different world altogether, a world which does not worry about the traffic that builds up once people start leaving office, a world which does not care about what to cook at night (for they make do with whatever they have), a world which does not know that something called the internet exists (let alone the shenanigans of social media). At one of the spots, ~ 40 kms from my in-laws’ town something incredible happened. We stopped for a cup of tea and the tea vendor knew my father-in-law. After being introduced as his daughter and son-in-law, the tea seller did not want to let us go empty handed and quickly rushed to his home to get some local delicacy which he could give to us. This had us (missus and me) thinking if our generation, or the ones to come, could ever establish the bond/connect that our fathers’ generation has. Moreover, with us living in cities and chasing our metaphorical dreams, is it even possible to have such a bonding? This took me to one of my favourite subjects: ‘Technology’.

If you were to ask me, what is the greatest invention that man has produced in my lifetime, my answer to that would be ‘Internet’. With internet coming in, distances have reduced, information parity has increased and the applications of information technology has created employment and provided so much convenience to the lives of the people. I would be using internet and technology almost interchangeably from here on in the blog, assuming that I have made my point. With anything that creates so much positive, there ought to be a flip side to it which is often ignored. While internet has made us self-sufficient and independent in our cash-rich but time-poor lives, it has minimized human interaction altogether. Let me take a stab at all instances in my daily life where I adopt technology – I book a cab for my office commute, I order grocery while on my way to office (to be delivered at a later time), I order lunch, I get back home to realise I had forgotten to take the packet of salt which was much needed at home, I Dunzo it and it reaches home in 20 mins. Having the convenience to book the cab at my finger-tips does prevent me from the haggling I need to do with my auto-wallah but more often than not, I do not even know the person who is driving me. If there is any confusion with regards to which route to take, I do not even need to speak to anybody for Google Maps provides me real time satellite imagery with expected time to reach my destination. The good old charm of bargaining with the family grocery store has been replaced by tons of VC-backed cashbacks that the grocery app offers. The only way I come to know of any new snack stall that has opened in my locality is by seeing it in the food delivery app. If it’s not there, it doesn’t exist for me. And at 9:30 pm in the night, when I realise, I had to bring a packet of salt and it presents me with an opportunity to borrow it from the neighbor (& in the process get familiar), the Dunzo App constantly reminds me of ‘Why Fikar, Dunzo Kar’. This takes me back to the pertinent question, will our generation ever be as close to the eco system (physically) as our previous generation is?

Is it a question of the Jio-fication (internet penetration) levels being low and hence the smaller towns still have their old-world charm preserved and intact? Or does the average small time person chase greater things in life like spending time with family than chase materialistic pleasures like a hefty pay hike, the next foreign trip, the next modern car etc. Sometimes I wonder if our generation ever got its priorities right. Most of us leave our homes and stay away from parents and are often not with them on regular days when they would need us. Instead, we are chasing our dreams and trying to stand on our own so that one day, we will be able to suffice for what may come. In the process, we end up staying apart for most of the time in order to be able to support when in future we stay together. Blessed are those who do not have to leave their parents or homes.

The other day I was watching a movie and there was a scene where some foreigners were being taken through ‘Dharavi’ (Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai), and were being given the tour of homes inside the slums in exchange of money. This is a legitimate business where the tourist is curious to see how the slum folks stay and are genuinely willing to pay money to get a glimpse of it. I now think of it, we are moving one step back (or front depending on the way you view it) and getting ourselves familiarized with our rural eco system. With the fad on farming increasingly getting popular in cities, people are now opting for a village-like living on weekends in the garb of adventure. The day is not far when we will re-connect with our rural counterparts and get amazed at how simple living can cure most of our technology inflicted urban stress. I often wonder if I should move back to a small town set-up and start living a more meaningful life where valuing the other person’s life and giving him/her the required time is going to matter more than earning quick bucks at the cost of time. I also wonder that whenever my baby is born, I would want to give her/him a taste of how the world looked like in the absence of technology – when writing letters had its own charm, power cuts in the evening signaled time to play out with other kids with no dearth of open spaces to play and not having to book a court using an app.

But I then back out. For it is time for my only free 2-hours-per-week-to-do-things-i-want-to to end, I have plethora of excel sheets to analyse and prepare a weekly report to be presented to my boss the next day, which would position me good in my professional equation at work & augur well for my incumbent appraisals which would then make me earn extra bucks every month, help me go to Europe for vacations, buy insurance for myself and my family and what all and what not.