Irony of an online life....

It is unfortunate that we are dangerously close to becoming a civilization with minimum or no emotional quotient..ironically at the same time we are the closest to becoming the most connected human beings in the last so many centuries.  We are lost without our social media updations, Facebook, whatsapp, the likes, the shares, the status updates that's all we do.  Here I am not negating some very powerful influence that the social media has in highlighting certain issues and getting it the right attention it deserves.  However, in-spite of all this power, networking, global world etc. etc. that earthy, simple human compassion is severely missing.

You have to just look around to see people cocooned in their own world with a smartphone in hand, its their world, the person sitting right in front or right beside is of no consequence, it is always the person who is online whether that person is genuine , fake, you know that person, has met, never met, never mind!!

From this stems another problem altogether and that is that as a parent I am truly dealing with a totally different set of problems than what my parents had to deal with, I am apprehensive and always on my guard to make my children aware and be sensible of the dangers lurking in a social media platform and at the same time I need to be equally vigilant of my daughter using even the kindle ...with the kind of access she has to all kinds of books at just a  tap..books..which can be dangerous for a teenager..

Also when I was a kid I remember running out of my house to the park right in front of my house to play for hours together, till dusk fell when my Mother would call me from the verandah.. but not my kids..  not your kids...first there is no time.. they have tuition classes, music classes, home work, assignments and then sometimes when they squeeze out some time to venture out... someone has to be there with them totally in vigil lest they fall prey to any untoward incident .. any anti social element which might be waiting in the shadow to strike.  

Do not think that I have gone paranoid, I am not, this is the reality of today, the Metro, the Capital where we live in where we do not know what is going on in the next flat .. and neither do we bother.. we come to know when somebody posts something on FB or something comes in the media.. even about something which happens in our neighbors flat. Also we talk to our neighbors in the whatsapp group made for RWA or the ladies group.. everybody is always online but if you emerge out of your flat thinking that today you will visit your neighbor.. be rest assured that she is busy on her smartphone..she would rather chat with you on Whatsapp...

Such is the irony of life.... it is like being alone in a crowd...