We recently shifted residence and to our luck the shift coincided with a long weekend. We disconnected broadband at our old home as we proceeded to the new.
Most internet service providers (ISP) have evolved a very effective technique of wearing down their harried customers and their bothersome queries. There is an interactive voice response (IVR) system that asks you 21 questions before you hit a dead end.
Most choices offered are deliberately ambiguous so that most customers just give up. We tried to beat the holiday weekend by disconnecting a day earlier in the fond hope that we will manage to reconnect at our new place in time. ISP spend much of their revenue on advertising their customer-friendliness and prompt services.
We learnt a bitter lesson when 32 attempts to speak to an executive failed and we accepted our fate. The long and short, we were without internet for 4 days. My mobile plan gives me very little data and I steadfastly save it for the GPS guidance while driving.
So, no Facebook, no Instagram, no YouTube, minimal Whatsapp or any of the other fancy windows to the virtual world. Though the virtual world closed for us, the real world emerged.
Less anxiety
The pangs of anxiety that I suffered on the COVID-19 situation in India with nauseating repetition of pictures of funeral pyres (someone rightly called it the Pyre-porn) had significantly moderated.
On calm reflection I realised that India, even with its constraints, conducted 2 million tests a day, managed to augment its Oxygen supply by ten times and had vaccinated nearly 220 million Indians.
Twitter, sadly, is the new world for the worthless. Here, you can advocate any cause and weigh in with your wisdom without any knowledge. It needs something controversial every morning for trolls to keep busy. It also occurred to me that twitter could run just as well without my insightful participation. More importantly, the disquiet that resulted when the twitter-tide flowed against my precious opinion, had greatly waned.
Rather pleasantly, I found my wife and children. Most of us come back home and take to our screens. Ear phones in place, each one of us an island. There is very little chat or exchange as academics, entertainment, social interaction, sport and information are all on the monitor.
My wife is an ardent soap aficionado and with nothing to do, settled for my company. Children raved and ranted and reconciled to this net-free subhuman existence. The family had those unforgettable dinners where we all talked to each other, just like the old times. Over-buoyed, my attempts at dinner-table humour threatened the proceedings but my wife’s interventions carried the day.
There was no stress of having to reflexly respond to birthdays and anniversaries or share tear-jerking memes on Sister’s day, Mother’s day or any day. There were no provocative political messages, no tiresome tic-tacs, no profound suggestions to make the world a better place and no famous words of famous men.
I realised that this very life that was so full of differences, diversity and disparities could still be pretty tranquil, if one cuts the cacophony out. The reality was simple and soothing while the virtual world was incessant, inciting, inflammatory and intrusive. It just did not cease to buzz in your head. For all its usefulness its adverse impact had acquired Frankensteinian proportions.
This was too good to last. My wife’s perseverance paid off and she on her 33rd attempt managed to find a human voice at the IVR. The exchange was not entirely cordial. The executive at the other end gave yet another email ID to write to and took no responsibility for the exaggerated claims of customer-friendliness in the loud advertorial jingle of the ISP. With some effort we got the internet back and all of us went back to our virtual worlds.
I will not forget those 4 days of peace and proximity, of calm and conversations, of the delight in detachment. Live without the internet for a few days and you too will experience peace.
Try it. It works.
Dr Rakesh Maggon is a specialist ophthalmologist with an interest in literature
