Life Was Easier When Apple and Blackberry Were Fruits

Dhak… dhak… dhak… DHAP!

Then total silence!

The first three words were the sounds of my heart beating as I watched my prized smartphone fly out of my hands from the landing of the first flight of steps which were actually 14 in number, towards the hard marble floor twelve feet below. (I can still recapture its entire flight in slow motion.)

The fourth word was how it sounded to my horrified ears as it landed with a harsh thud, face down, on the floor below.

And then there was total silence for a few seconds, after which a flurry of activity began, chiefly involving an SOS scream for my son, followed by a mad race downstairs to pick up my phone. Fortunately, it was still in one piece. But no amount of first aid could revive its ‘touch’ sensor, without which it was, as far as I could understand, practically useless.

For once, I had to stand shamefacedly under the stern glare of my seventeen-year-old son, who is the epitome of carefulness. (He still has his favourite childhood Meccano set preserved intact, and I suspect that the big box of partially used, colourful oil pastels stashed away in his drawer is the same one I gifted him on his seventh birthday.)

My favourite one-liner, ‘Learn from your elders,’ backfired royally when he scornfully said, “How careless can you get? Isn’t this what I will learn from my mother?”

Any other time, I would have given him a look that would have silenced him. But seeing the semi-comatose gadget in my hand, which had been a lively companion till just a few minutes earlier, I swallowed the heartless jibes and set off to the service centre with a heavy but optimistic heart.

Problem one was tackled. The bigger problem now was getting a replacement phone until I got mine back which would be almost a week later.

Unfortunately, I did not have a spare one in hand, and the only way of taking revenge for my son’s barbed comments was by getting him to lend me his brand-new Blackberry (without a Blackberry connection). And grudgingly he did, especially since I had to travel for a few days and, moreover, since his exams were on, he was mostly at home with access to the landline.

Sweet of him, you would say. But little did I know what I was getting into!

I now had to account for every speck of dust that could be seen through a magnifying glass on his phone. And I also had to share the phone with him, the requirement for which could arise at just about any unearthly hour of the day. Well, beggars can’t be choosers, as the saying goes…

This was only a small part of the story.

Apart from the fact that I had become sort of handicapped due to the loss of all my contacts—for some mysterious reason, this Blackberry phone refused to acknowledge the numbers and other data stored on my SIM card—I realized that I had been afflicted with another serious malady.

I had heard about the withdrawal symptoms experienced by drug addicts and alcoholics. To my horror, I was experiencing something along those lines.

How would I live without accessing my Facebook account every ten minutes?

What would people think if I wasn’t available online twenty-four hours a day on Gtalk?

Oh my God! How would I talk to my Skype contacts?

How could I remain unconnected with my WhatsApp and Viber friends?

How would I know the news, weather and temperature of various parts of the world?

Talk about panic buttons and alarm bells!

It has been two weeks since my ailing phone was shifted to the ICU of yet another specialty service centre, awaiting an organ transplant.

Surprisingly, after the first few days of acute withdrawal symptoms, I find that life is not as bad as I thought.

To my surprise, I realize that I am still in touch with all the family and friends who matter; my various projects and work go on without a hitch; and I find that it is perfectly all right if I am not an active part of the online community. But more importantly, I realize that I am not that important a person as I had deemed myself to be, and neither do I run this world.

I don’t have to be accessible to the whole world twenty-four hours a day.

And the greatest advantage of this revelation is that I have so much more time on my hands—time that would otherwise have been spent unproductively on social networking sites, posting comments that don’t matter to people in the first place, reading and liking highly opinionated posts, and going through umpteen inspirational quotes, status updates, pictures and messages, most of which, I suspect, make little sense even to the person who shared them.

I hope to get my mobile phone back in a few days’ time. But more than that, I am hoping that I will be able to remember these precious lessons and consider the gadget as just an electronic device for my convenience, and not something I need to depend on for my survival.

“You have left my phone lying face down on the bed! What if it develops a scratch…?”

There goes the monster of my son again…

For once, I have to agree with the writing on his T-shirt:

“Life was much easier when Apple and Blackberry were just fruits.”