Not your average 60 minutes..
She sat back ready for the 2-hour long ride that would take her to her workplace. She looked around, not one familiar face. Like you expected a welcoming hug, she mocked herself. She had woken up late today, beer from yesterday's party to blame for. Thus she found herself waking up, cursing loudly for having overslept. She put away her bag, immediately pulling out her phone, she had switched to a smartphone recently & she threw a furtive glance at the guy sitting next to her to see if his phone had better specs than hers. These days phones defined you!
She listened, the bus seemed eerily silent. She wondered if she could test the pin-drop silence theory. As she wondered, the bus came to a sudden halt. The driver has lost his mind, she thought after a hell lot of swearing. She looked around quickly to see if anybody was shooting her dirty looks for the words she had just uttered in her anger. Seemed to her that nobody had, in fact they all reminded her of zombies from this show her friend went on & on about, The Walking Dead, oblivious to everything around.
Anyway back to her own world, her hand automatically went to the Facebook icon, which was blinking furiously with notifications on her phone, she reminded herself yet again she would turn on the live feed tonight so she didn't have to go through the hassle of check her updates in all those networking sites. After the customary Facebook update(complaints about traffic blah blah) & a quick look at the twitter page, (she only ever tweeted so she would stay relevant, that's what her friends told her. She didn't get the point of writing it all in 140 characters, the language was abundant with difficult words, courtesy of her GRE coaching SIGH!) she returned to the physical world. The guy next to her had dozed off! That was fast, she reckoned. The lady in the front seemed to be struggling with a cake recipe, either the person on the other end was deaf or she was, because she was making no effort, whatsoever, to keep her voice down. She was distracted by the very obvious aroma of home-made puliogare, apparently the guy in the seat behind her was hungry! The cook had done a fantastic job on it, she instantly felt hungry herself. The lady next to him obviously had problems with her nose, she didn't seem to have noticed the delicious aroma wafting through the bus, she was engrossed in page 3 of Bangalore times.
She let her mind wander & it landed on the latest Bollywood break up scandal. She felt the itch to discuss this topic, her female instinct to dig deep about anything remotely related to gossip empowering her. Only one thing stopping her, whom does she talk to? She considered the people on her bus. The lady over the phone now seemed to be engrossed in a very thorough chiding session. The dozing guy was now snoring. The lady with the newspaper was reading the beauty section with intense attention. The guy with the tiffin box seemed to have moved onto a smaller box, the items of which didn't give out any strong scents, as yet. She strained her neck to look beyond. Two seats to the front, the guy on the i-pad was playing plants vs zombies 2, that's a nice game she reminded herself, making a mental note to buy an i-pad with her next raise. There was a tattooed guy sitting across him, & he seemed to have forgotten he was in a bus. From the way he moved, he might as well have been at a concert, his skullcandy headphones threatening to burst with loud music anytime now. A shrill sound came from the far end of the bus, the lady it belonged to seemed to be too tied up, in her kindle, to make it stop. The guy in the front was engrossed in a movie, by the looks of it was a movie in which a mobster was getting shot at by the officials. Next to him was a pretty girl, typing very furiously on her phablet? Phones were just not enough these days, we need a phone that resembles a tablet, but with phone capabilities nevertheless. They all seemed glued to their own worlds, not to be disturbed by a mere mortal, to do anything as mundane as TALK!
Now what to do with her 60 minutes? She recalled the city when not everybody you met would greet you with a stony face. When talking to the person travelling 35kms with you, twice a day, every single day was not a sacrilegious crime. She realized with a pang that she herself hadn't had a conversation without the means of technology for awhile now. She had whatsapped her friends on her daily bus that she had missed the bus & would take the late bus. She had called her boss to tell him she might not be available in office till late morning. She had logged onto her laptop to reschedule a meeting. She wished her best friend from school a very happy birthday & loads of hugs & kisses on Facebook. She had left a mail to her friend, asking him what happened to their plans for the weekend. She had called her mom in the morning, a routine conversation followed. She had turned on the radio on her phone, thank god her phone had one, while she bathed. She made her highest score, on temple run, while waiting for the bus. She had also watched a couple of videos on YouTube on her way to the bus stop. She had checked when her order would be delivered, she needed clothes & make up for herself for Diwali & she was gifting a kindle to her brother this festival. She also made a mental note to pay her phone bill, online banking had made it all easy, thank God! she thought.
In doing all this, she had only looked at one-side of the story, that she had the world at her finger tips, but she hadn't realized that one day, she would be seated in a bus full of people, each busy in their own little worlds (called the cellphone) that she would feel alone in the rush of digitization. All the data she needed at her fingertips & she yearned for a person to speak to. Right now, she didn't care how many likes she had got on her status or how many followers she had on twitter, she just needed somebody to say hey, long time! to her. It didn't matter that she had 500 friends on Facebook, she needed 1 friend to ask her how she had been doing after a rough couple of months at work. It had seemed quite grand to wish a friend who was halfway across the world, but it didn't feel the same to see a haphazard "Happy Birthday!! Have a great year! Loads of Love!" scrawled over her "wall". Her aching bottom, after a thorough birthday bums session brought a more genuine smile to her lips than a "gift for Starbucks for your birthday" did! The numerous truth or dares that she had played definitely stumped her Temple run scores. The smell of those fresh pages on a book seemed so much more of an alluring experience than her fancy kindle e-book felt like. Gifting gadgets had become an in thing, she didn't know that to show your brother how much you loved him, you need to gift him a top-of-the-line I phone. When they were kids, it meant getting him his favorite chocolate. As she sat and wondered, the bus pulled into the campus & it was time to get off.
The last hour seemed to have flown away in a flurry of hazy pictures in her head, and these 60 minutes she noticed went away faster than her digital 60 minutes did! If you're sitting here reading this, with a nostalgic smile dancing on your lips, then you sure had some taste of both the worlds. Only, one world seems to be turning into a thing of the past.
