Where am I?

I must apologise, to myself. For the span that I've been away, from myself. For I am perhaps the only one in this bright, cozy, cool room from where I can see it rain outside, when I so desire.
I see no cobwebs here, no dust. It is as though I was expected each day, to this room of my own. I am a man, and I too need a room.

I have felt a deep longing for this room, now perhaps more than ever. I will not reveal why. Open the cupboard in that corner and you'll know. But I will not unlock it for you. Let it remain therein.

If there were other inmates here, they would not have recognised me today. I know, because people have told me. I have looked at myself too. There are mirrors here. But I do not know how true they are. So maybe I don't quite know. I am glad this mental institution houses me, and me alone.

Speed kills. Or does it?

The following piece was drafted almost five years ago, but for some reason that I do not recollect, i was never published. But while smartphone technology has progressed a lot since then, and so have internet speeds, this blog post seems relevant even today.

This blog post was spurred, triggered off by something a friend wrote in the morning wherein, she's talking about the keep-in-touch-syndrome,(a term I believe she coined) (http://sayujya.blogspot.com/2010/05/keep-in-touch-syndrome.html ) which I feel is more or less similar to a phenomenon I visited last year (http://blogitmonu.blogspot.com/2009/06/whither-patience.html )
The cell phone and its perceived inevitability is the point of contention. The affordability of a handset, the opportunity to message: thousands of messages for less than a tenth of the number, to call for a pittance, have made many of us compulsive users of the device.
I'm a cell-phone addict myself .I depend on my mobile for sending messages, calls (obviously!), for taking pictures, for listening to music, for checking up the dictionary. I don’t think of the mobile as evil, I think of it as my constant companion—something that satisfies my ‘need’ of staying connected or networked. This is the larger picture. This is what drives a lot of today’s fads including social networking. Like many others of my age, I cannot stand a moment without being updated. I’m restless. I complain about slower net speeds. I want instant access to news. I find myself continually on the refresh button. I cannot do with the stale stuff that was ‘new’ a minute ago.
The hurry of today's life is definitely nauseating at times. Many of us have not enjoyed a moment when all is still—a moment when the past seems never to have existed, and the future seems never to exist, when there seems to be no difference between the two.

A moment when the present moment is all that one can sense, experience and be concerned about. No. We’ve experienced no such thing. We’ve no time for such moments. But the fact is that when it makes people's lives a lot easier, a lot faster, they move at a particular pace expecting others to do so too. It’s like a metro train. It stops at a station, but only so that it can move on to the next one. And in the limited time that it does, one has to ensure that one disembarks, or risk being carried away by time.
Maybe it’s about power relations as well-when people in power move at a pace ‘x’, you're left with no option but to try and catch up.
And then at the other end of the power spectrum, we've the lower classes that’re being empowered because of the cell-phone or other like spin-offs of the 'instant' revolution. Instant technology is being seen as a tool to fight corruption, a weapon against the opaqueness of babudom, as a symbol of transparency—a case in point being the live telecast of proceedings of both houses of Parliament.

I believe (and this is just a hypothesis of mine) it’s the privileged classes who’re more uncomfortable with this democratization of ‘instant’ technology. Instant technology, take for instance the above mentioned example of the live telecast of Parliament proceedings, is breaking through bastions of power, is exposing power being misused, and making those in power more vulnerable to being displaced from seats of power. Thus what is essentially happening is that hitherto underpowered people are now gaining access to things that were the sole preserve of the privileged few. Even those who spout nostalgia about the good ol’days when things were slower are more often than not people who led middle or upper class existences then, for whom the going was never tough, whose lives, unlike that of many others, were never transformed beyond recognition. The rural farmer who, prior to the telecom revolution, was bereft of connectivity of any sort, and who now receives weather alerts, market updates on his phone can never thank the gadget enough.
Although the cell phone industry began operations in India way back in 1995, the telecom boom is a recent phenomenon. A faster, mobile communication system was the need of the hour, what with the economy on a longish bull-run. Thus we warranted the cell phone’s existence. And then, thanks to innovative marketing, smart pricing, plus the numbers that India’s got, the cell phone created space for itself, thriving on the obsession that the urban user with the device.