Skip to main content

Wi-Fi Relationships


The three girls grew up together right from primary school.  They studied in the same school and lived in the same premises.  When schooling was completed, they went to different colleges.  But they met every evening for some time in an open area near their homes.  They would sit together and chat while their fingers moved dexterously on the keypad of their smartphone.  The occasional giggle or  peel of laughter that was let out did not considerably affect their engagement with the phone.  Now that they live in different places, the relationships must have turned entirely virtual, I guess. 

In the same city, I have noticed people, especially those not old enough to dye their hair, engrossed totally with their mobile phones while travelling in the metro trains or buses, while talking to people in various places, or even while looking after a patient in a hospital.  

I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone posing for a selfie with the dead body of his/her grandfather or an aunt and then posting it at Facebook or Instagram. 

Relationships have gone wi-fi.  The people far away seem to be a lot more important, or at least interesting, than those nearby.  Distance lends enchantment to relationships, perhaps.  The ‘likes’ in the virtual world are much more articulated than in the real world.  And people are far more generous with ‘likes’ in that world rather than in this.  That world!  That’s a Paradise, Heaven on earth!  People there ‘like’ whatever you do, whatever you write, whatever pictures of yourself you pass on.  How nice to be liked so much!

Is that an escape into a world of soothing illusions?

Is genuine love an emotion which binds people together more in bad times than in good ones?  Wouldn’t I rather be with my beloved one in the storm rather than be safe by myself?  Are there real seas without those storms?

If the person who makes you the happiest does not also occasionally make you the saddest, the love that binds the two of you may not last very long.  Still more, things not said matter much more than those said in a genuine relationship.  What is not said cannot be expressed in that virtual Paradise.  The gaze in the eyes and pulse of the heart are too real for the virtual sites.  Emoticons are too mechanical to carry emotions.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 128: Technology is destroying relationships. Genuine relationships are subsumed under Facebook and whatsapp... #Relationship



Indian Bloggers



Comments

  1. OnePourTreeJuly 29, 2016 at 6:35 PM

    This is the sad truth of life now. Technology is a boom and a curse at the same time. And we are becoming slaves to it, rather than its master.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 30, 2016 at 7:25 AM

      Aren't we similarly being enslaved by religion too? Look at the way militants and terrorists and fundamentalists are imposing religion on us and how many people accept it too. Look at the following link and other related articles in the latest Outlook to understand the latest innovative methods of religious crusade:

      http://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/intro-the-sanghs-stolen-child-crusade/297609

      Delete
  2. sunaina sharmaJuly 29, 2016 at 7:13 PM

    It depends on us too, how much we allow technology to enter our lives.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 30, 2016 at 7:26 AM

      Tell that to the adolescents and those in their twenties. Not that the others have grown up really.

      Delete
  3. Purba chakrabortyJuly 30, 2016 at 2:33 AM

    Totally agree with you. Emoticons can never carry real emotions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 30, 2016 at 7:27 AM

      On the contrary, they help people display emotions which they don't have!

      Delete
  4. D.NambiarJuly 30, 2016 at 5:00 AM

    It's true that there's too much technology in our lives.

    Even though emoticons don't carry real emotions, I like them. They help when the 'tone' of a person cannot be heard. I'm sure there'd more misunderstandings if there were no emoticons to go with the texts and messages we send out.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 30, 2016 at 7:28 AM

      That's fine with light writing. Do you think serious writing can be effective with emoticons?

      Delete
  5. RinzuAugust 4, 2016 at 9:37 AM

    It's true, emoticons can't express real human emotions!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more