The last Friday, I was at school my alma mater for a reunion with my schoolmates to be precise. Given that the distance from home to school remains the same, it was walkable say some 2.4 km distance, these days we would be doing the same in a bike or a car. Time changes right.
I can also imagine those days of uninhibited roads without the kind of traffic and you could travel without worrying who would jump in front of you. We used to walk to school get the classmates enroute and the gang would reach there. Better still we would cycle all the way to reach there and not get late for the assembly.
Ok the reason I am writing this is when I went to the ground where the school day was being celebrated, I could see almost everyone with a phone albeit a smartphone actually, i mean every kid was in conversation or fidgeting with the phone. May be this was a day off for them to use the phone.
Well I travelled back to my school days, we didn’t have a phone like this which we could carry with us. We were introduced to a phone the mobile phone to be precise towards the later 90s when the machine would be really big and you had to pay through your nose to make a call or receive one.
In between we had something called pagers that was the SMS part if you ask me and you had to call a pager service provider to send an SMS to the person who had a pager. The technology had its failings to be only short circuited by mobile revolution.
Then the big changes had happened with feature phones, then the smart phones in the last 5 years! The phones have now become an additional part of your being. An extension of your personal self. You probably wouldn’t sleep without it beside you.
Its become the mode of communication, the messengers, the whatsapp et al. Whatsapp has become a verb than a noun or a name of a service today. It has percolated at all levels and if you know the best part is the ease of use that is driving the usage.
My point here was to take you to a different line. Has these things ever come in the way of the individual being the real one. Has it diminished the so called innocence factor atleast in out kids. Or we just looking at clicking pictures to post on social networks that we forget to enjoy the happenings of what unfolds in front of us.
As long as you control the machine its fine, when the machine starts to control you we need to pause and think over.