Very
recently I have started travelling to work by Metro. It takes me exactly an
hour to reach office from the metro opposite my house. For that one hour I make
sure to put my beloved iPhone inside my backpack because I know how painful it
is to loose a costly phone, lost one a couple of years ago in the same metro,
sigh!
Anyway,
this piece is not to tell you how much I fear of losing my phone but I wanted to
talk about that one hour without a communication device.
It
is just an hour but in that one hour I feel I have got my eyes, ears & most
importantly my senses back (did I loose them somewhere). We are so much lost in our phones and don’t realize
how much we get cut off from the world around us. The idea is not to preach you
that how beautiful this world is without mobile phones and blah blah…but it’s
really amazing how in the same coach as you are traveling, you come across so
many mixed emotions, behaviors and personalities that have the power to involve your senses without you even realizing.
I
could hear somebody telling a stranger in his broken English language that he
works in the Platinum credit card department of some leading bank and I could sense
pride in his words. He was very happy, today he completed his 3 months in the
bank. He even exchanged his visiting card with a promise to call that co passenger some time soon, maybe he just sold a credit card.
I
saw a very old Sardar Ji rushing to get a seat in metro which actually belongs
to him, real irony is this that he doesn’t get it obviously and had to request
a young man who jumped there seconds earlier, to vacate it for him. That man
did vacate the seat but instead of seeing victory in his eyes I saw defeat in
them. May be he was already more tired in his life than that old man.
There
are no standards, no classes, no biasness (apart from the gender biasness for
obvious reasons) in the metro. In the rush hour, everybody is so closely
standing to each other without any complaints and that same person shies away
from being that close with his own brother, sister, wife, mother, father on weekend
family outings.
All
those who could afford to buy a multimedia phone are glued to their screens
watching movie, chatting, selecting songs, reading eBooks & are just
clueless about who is sitting next or standing in front of them. It’s no
different in other cities or countries, its ok, I don’t even want to change
this, why should I care, after all I should be thankful that I saved my mobile
phone from my notorious fellow travelers.
These experiences are not such that I remember them for my entire life but also the question is, what
do I gain by observing my surrounding in that one hour, I don’t really know but
what I know is that I haven’t lost anything in that hour except my worries.
