My best buddies

Text Message

Gmail

Facebook

My new buddies are Gmail, Facebook and Text Message. I check on them ever so often, that by now I see them in my dreams, almost every day. There was a time when mornings started with prayers, the smell of incense sticks wafting in the air, as people bowed in reverence in front of their favorite deities. 


Now it is the smart phone or the computer deity that has taken the place of God, instead of the prayers there is the soft sound of the keys being pressed, as we check for new updates. It is where social life stirs into action – the hub of our connection with the world.

Gone are those days when the next door neighbor or a faraway friend was at your doorstep for no particular reason. People did not need a reason to see each other, it could be just a simple, “I haven’t seen you in a while” or “I was passing by” or “ Can I have glass of water?” Invariably no one was turned away even during the busiest of hours. It was considered rude to treat a “Ghar may aaya mehmaan” – “ a house guest” poorly. People had a higher level of tolerance. 

Now as we get pickier and pickier about who we want to talk to or be friends with, actually meeting another human being has become very time consuming, A lot of planning goes on via the newly acquired buddies. There is such a herculean effort involved in two live people meeting that it actually becomes an event that needs to be recorded on a cell phone and commemorated on Facebook.  Now those people who met, might spend more time on Facebook looking at that “eventful picture” and commenting, reading and responding to each other’s comments that it just might exceed the actual duration that they met for?

Reality strikes for just a little while, when I almost crash into a tree while reading a text message. I promise to stay away from my buddies while driving.  Then after five whole minutes of separation from my phone, I have this dying need to know if any of my buddies have any updates for me. How can they live without me? And how can I live without them? It is a perfect form of symbiotic relationship. I feel lost, outdated and shunned out of this world, without my buddies. I could be in a room full of people but I feel vulnerable and completely alone, without my buddies.

My buddies have become my life!  Who told me I needed them? How did this all come about? All of us believed these buddies would make our lives more convenient but the situation has become so dire that we need them to survive, though once, we were perfectly fine without them - today we cannot even function without them. We have all the time in the world devoted to our three inanimate buddies. They are the source of our connection with the world and yet again never in our lives have we felt so disconnected with each other as human beings. Oops! I forgot to mention my latest buddy....my precious blog!