Spoiler In Disguise

So far researchers have tried to find out if cellphone towers cause cancer and if sleeping with the instrument next to you renders you impotent or frigid. But what they are not telling you is how its use fries your brain cells. The mobile phone kills the most innate function of your mind—to wander, to ponder, to wonder. It kills wit, repartee, argument, debate. Do you think Socrates, Plato or Aristotle would have sat in the city square of Athens mul­ling over monism and pluralism if they had smartphones with Google in 5 BC? Or even if they had, would any Athenian have gat­hered to listen to their dialogues on life and the universe if they had Youtube? Of course, Socrates may have lived a few more years, as Change.org would have sta­rted a movement against him being force-fed hemlock, but what use a few more years if his life went unexamined?

Ironically, the mobile phone kills conversation. So, travelling from Patna to Benares by the longer route, past the town of Buxar, when someone in the car asks, ‘Is this the Buxar of Battle of Buxar? What exactly happened?’, nob­­ody looks out the window and ponders. Nobody racks his brains to go back to his history textbook, none of us asks, ‘Wasn’t it a fight between the Nawab of Bengal Mir Qasim and the British, or was it the King of Awadh Shuja-ud-Daulah?’ Instead, it’s fastest fingers first, and one of us comes up with the drab Wikipedia entry: The Battle of Buxar was fought on October 23, 1764, between the forces of the British East India Company led by Hector Munro and the combined army of Mughal rulers.

It kills wonderment. So, on our way from Almora to Pithoragarh, as we come across a tree with flaming red flowers with petals like lobster’s legs and when someone guffaws in wonder, ‘Isn’t this the flame of the forest?’, nobody says ‘No, this is a coral tree, the actual flame of the forest is the palash, which has flowers more bunched up’. Instead, we all come up with this from flowersofindia.net on our phones: Butea monosperma is a species of Butea native to tropical and sub-tropical parts of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia...and nip any wandering of the mind, well, in the bud. But it leads to leaps of creativity in other ways. For instance, the guy laden with packets sitting next to you in the multiplex showing Love, Sex aur Dhoka ans­w­ers his phone incessantly rin­­ging to the tune of Om Jai Jagadish Hare: ‘Yes, I’m just round the corner, will be there in ten minutes’; ‘No, I’m badly stuck in a jam and the shock absorbers of my bike are broken’; ‘Yes sir, I have delivered the pa­c­ket long ago; what? They called? Can’t be’; and this to presumably a call from a friend: ‘Abey yaar, no, there is no love or sex in this film, only dhoka’.

It strangulates story-telling. So, as an uncle with bushy eyebrows and a proud paunch sinks into the sofa with a double scotch saying, ‘This win is nothing. The real win was in ’86, when Gavaskar’s team beat the English at Lord’s’, the nerdy nephew with Steve Jobs spectacles, hair falling over his eyes, wearing tyre-like headphones, diaphragm vibrating to pounding music, and who is tweeting, is on FB, Whatsapping, arranging his photos and yet miraculously listening in to the drawing room conversation and googling about it, whispers dryly, ‘It wasn’t Gavaskar’s team, Kapil Dev was the captain’. When the uncle disregards this and continues, ‘I remember, we were all huddled in our rajais in our quarter in the cantonment area of Jabalpore’, the nephew looks up from his mobile and supplies this: ‘It can’t be, that match was in June’!

The phone makes us click furiously the moment our food arrives in a restaurant; it makes us all put on the handcuffs voluntarily as the plane tou­ches down on the runway; it makes us all look furtively at our groins in office meetings; it peeps into our most intimate actions; it just doesn’t let us be, just sits there next to us, always dem­anding attention. It’s like a Vethalam which Vikramaditya cannot ever shake off.