Welcome to the Matrix – Chawm Ganguly

I earn the old fashioned way – slogging away as if there is no tomorrow. My wife spends it the smart way – net banking, electronic wallets, wi-fi coupons and what not. Why, even our groceries are home delivered by a guy who swipes her card every time we run out of garlic. And the website from where she sources our medicines gives her a complimentary basket of phenol – apparently, the obvious malice of the joke: if one doesn’t work, use the other – not registering on her connected and e-enabled mind.

I save my biggest smiles for the taxi drivers who still treat me as a leper, consistently refusing to take me to where I have to go. My wife keys in some commands and bingo! A swank cab arrives out of nowhere. One that is clean, GPS enabled and debits the fare with a no-jhanjhat shrug of indifferent efficiency. Phew!

My wife’s phone keeps her up to date about her heart beats. Her phone bills make me skip mine – heart beats that is!

Welcome to our family. We are all of three. We live behind a firewall protected, sanitized environment that is guarded against viruses and restricts the access of known spammers and paid trollers. I don’t know, who set up the protocol, but my mother has only limited access into our private space, and all sorts of alarms go up every time my other relatives arrive, virtually labeling them as carriers of contagious diseases. Do I detect, just a hint, of a sinister exaltation behind my wife’s smirk when that happens?

We have five smart phones, three laptops and two tablets between us. Oh, I forgot “Woof”, our virtual pet who is poop trained and eats goodies that have to be purchased in the dark net using bitcoins. We send each other smiley’s when we are happy; we vent our anger in Twitter and like each other’s pictures in Instagram – at the least, it lets us know who’s doing what. When our anger gets worse, we yell “OLX main bech de.” Such is our attention span, which incidentally, latest research tells me, is the shortest in the history of mankind – that we need GPRS to find our Bathrooms, yet, we Tweet like mad and have selfies to prove. Why, even the PM’s office keeps us all posted!

We, my friends have bridged the digital divide, have replaced our emotions with emoticons and are, like you people say “Social Media enabled”.  We hardly ever talk to each other, preferring the SMS route better and family eatout’s are merely excuses to let our virtual friends take a voyeuristic peek at our plates.

My 8 year old son’s best friend is some weird 18-year old gaming millionaire from Russia, who plays video games all day and has a retinue of assistants who record and post them in You Tube. Apparently, he earned his millions before he was 13 and has obscene millions following him from around the world. My wife is one better on the son – her best friend is an App that compares prices of everything that you don’t need within 13 nano seconds and automatically blocks out anyone who, according to its custom algorithms, may order the same items of irreverence.

We are perpetually on a short fuse – our attention spans never being higher than a few seconds. We skim read stuff and file away everything that is more than 3 sentences long to be eaten and digested at leisure (read to be recycled in 15 minutes).

We are pretty vocal about rights of Olive Ridley Turtles. We register our opinion about every damn thing that is wrong with this Godforsaken country. We press the Like button even on posts that we don’t understand or which relate even remotely to us, and are generally the guys all those marketers have termed as the Great Indian Middle Class. We are global in our outlook, celestial in our posts and downright parochial in our actions. Period. Thank you Social Media for bringing out the worst in us.

We are also extremely close ended. We abhor, I repeat, abhor, people who dissent. You don’t like my political views? Block. You don’t like the colour of my leggings? Block. You don’t dig MineCraft? Block and Report. We are empowered. Internet has given us the right to cut out, nay cull, everyone who is not an exact replica of ourselves – I mean one of our many selves, for each of us has multiple personas in the virtual space, avatars, if you may.

Friends, now look at the flip side. Most of us suffer from lifestyle illnesses, as we have forgotten what physical exercising is (and no, that does not include posting Yoga Day cards or walking to wall socket to plug in our chargers). We are totally at a loss in actual, Real, inter personal relationships. We play no games (no, Subway Surfer doesn’t qualify as a Sport) and are horrified at the prospect of getting out of our cocoons of comfort. Real, “Flesh and Blood” friends? Hell, what’s that? Me thought, Astronomic 95 was my Best Buddy Forever. Does it matter that I don’t know where he is from, or even whether he is a BOT? Not really, he has a Klout score of 79 and has long maxed out his Facebook friend list. That is what matters in our Digital Duniya.

What if he is a pedophile masquerading as a friend? A drug seller, promising the ultimate high? A recruiter for a Jehadi organisation with promises of eternal bliss after you blow yourself to smithereens? Or on a more prosaic level, just a scamster wanting to phis out your details? Who knows? More importantly, who cares?

We are on a mission to create the biggest Morons of all times. We can’t write two sentences coherently but key in like mad men, possessed. We can’t do anything without asking Google for answers and wish for an auto speech check the way Word corrects our spellings. We do our homework on the net – and yes, since all of us are anyways coping from the first 5 pages of the search results that Google comes up with – our work is terribly dumbed down, is indistinguishable from others and as brain-dead as the Zombies our Plants exterminate in Plants VS Zombies.

Friends, it wasn’t like this when we were growing up. We had real friends. Our families were flesh and blood. We didn’t give our fathers high 5’s. We mugged up tables. We had books to keep us company. We bled when we hurt ourselves and yes, it used to hurt like mad. Media meant the newspapers and being social was what we did in family marriages. Thank You God, for bringing me to the world before the smart phones and the laptops. Thank you, I had what was once known as a childhood.

We had grown up with Rebellion in our hearts when, in our salad days in school, our anthem was Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no Education / We don’t need no thought control”. I shudder today, as I see myself, see you all, our children … each one of you, no more than a brick in the digital, social wall. Perhaps even worse – a bit and a byte in the worm hole that leads to a neverland of no return.

Welcome to the Matrix, agents!