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Overdependence can prove debilitating!

Overdependence can prove debilitating!
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Desh Bir
Machines have turned into masters and we have very passively surrendered ourselves into their hands. There was a time, some ten or twelve years ago, when people would turn to me on the phone and wish me to get them someone’s phone number and I could conveniently and immediately tell them the number straight from my memory.
Then gradually I found that all such cerebral labour of storing and retrieving phone numbers from one’s memory was a futile human exertion when the cell phone could store it and fetch it for us on a simple verbal command. My penchant for remembering people’s mobile numbers witnessed its slow withering and I no longer remember these 10 digits even in respect of my own family.
A worrisome situation arose for many in our circles last fortnight when a colleague and friend living in another distant town of Punjab after her retirement suddenly went offline and did not respond to daily morning greetings. We were left clueless and tried to contact one another to reach out to her, but to no avail.
Then I blamed myself for not having obtained another phone number, may be of some member of family. For once I tried to believe that she might have been on a visit to one of her children abroad (though there was no such information with me) because the youth from Punjab are making a beeline for careers in America, Canada and Australia. As such, I tried to place a call in the Indian afternoons. Yet again, no such call was collected.
Yesterday, another colleague tried to call her and this time he was able to get connected, of course, with a sigh of great relief. Her phone had collapsed and needed replacement of a part as well as a new Sim Card… There being a confusingly vast number of brands and models of cell phones like cars in the Indian market today, sometimes finding the exact component readily is not possible and that is what happened with our friend.
Like most of us, she had depended on the memory of the cell phone and as she had not found any use for maintaining a paper diary for recording phone numbers, she waited and waited for her own phone to come back after repairs so that after getting a new Sim Card for the old number, she could call people to get their numbers afresh. The real trouble came up when the repaired phone did not retrieve the contacts for which she probably hadn’t taken the Google protection.
All this caused much worry among the people known to her but stationed at distances. While we were uncomfortable as no contact was possible, she must have felt practically suffocated in the absence of a digital record of her contacts. Only she knows how she managed to tide over the blank period while she stood disconnected from the world of digital contacts.
Now, she says, she has found a sure remedy against the repetition of a similar situation. She has made a resolve to maintain a parallel record of phone numbers of all friends and relatives, who henceforth call her, on a diary so that she doesn’t face the same blankness again. Truly, our over dependence on the machine-brain can prove debilitating!
(The author is a Retired Principal, Govt. College, Hoshiarpur (Punjab)

 


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