Skip to main content

Reset Time

Meeting A on my trip to India was a return to childhood in many ways. We go back to the end of high school which feels like an infinitely long time ago. It is great to be able to reset to a very uncomplicated time of our lives whenever we meet. It is almost impossible to stay in the here and now for too long - we have our happy place that is too easy to return to and we do that reflexively. 

Yes, there were conversations about her ailing parents, the need for nursing care and what their long term care means for her own life since she is single and has no plans of changing that. While those are real problems she is dealing with everyday, having an escape even for a few days gave her much needed reset. It is sad to read that the young people of today may not have such a luxury when they are our age. 

The internet is the “main contender” for blame, Blanchflower told Al Jazeera. “Nothing else fits the facts.”

In 2024, a Pew Research Survey found that three in four American teenagers felt happy or peaceful when they were without their smartphones. Researchers behind a 2024 study showing that British teenagers and preteens were the least happy in Europe also concluded that social media was a key reason.

Blanchflower’s assertion appears to be backed up by research in other nations worldwide, including the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, where more and more youths are gaining access to smartphones.

A and I wrote letters to each other after college for several years. I might still have some of them in the attic. She had a job that required travel to remote locations around India with no access to internet and international phone calls were expensive as well as unreliable. It slowed our communication and made things count. We'd write a letter over a period of time as things happened in our lives, ideas came to mind and so on. By the time we mailed it, there was a ton of ground covered. 

We both use WhatsApp now and every once in a while the conversations have the same level of richness and depth as those letters did. We'd likely never have the quality of friendship we do if we had internet and smartphones when we first met at an age when so much growing up is left to do.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more