1. You're under the radar, fully and finally. All those times you groaned inside at the thought of replying to someone on WhatsApp because they probably have seen you online and will wonder why you're not replying, all those times you've wished you could just burn your phone instead of the complicated dance of blocking/being invisible/avoiding someone in your daily online life -- it feels exactly like you dreamed it would.
2. When you're in a bookstore or a metro station, and your cousins browse different ends of the huge-ass vastness that is most things in America, you realise how handicapped you are without a phone. If you lose sight of them completely, you can't call them. They can probably call each other and discuss how stupid their cousin is while they search for me.
3. The times when I didn't take my wallet with me, I realise how pointless I am as a subject. Without money or a phone, I am pretty much useless to this economy. It's fascinating roaming the aisles of huge stores that way. Like an empty kernel of possibility, disguised as an interested buyer.
4. You're lost. Even in conversation. Before, when your phone worked and data plans were cheap, you peppered conversations with google search results, quickly accessing information that slipped your mind, putting to rest heated disagreements between people over niggling details, once and for all. Now though, interestingly, conversations are longer. You have to rely on older methods of verifying a fact. You ask around, you postulate, you deduce, you speculate.
The answer is still a google search away, but that doesn't come until hours later, in the comfort and familiarity of your relatives' house where your phone comes to life like a brain-dead monster only under the spell of WiFi.
5. Your fingers don't ache as much.
6. Once you lose the drift of real time -- coupled with time zone differences -- the phone ritual is about catching up. You get WiFi, wait until your phone un-hangs because of all the sudden influx of data, respond to everything you've missed in the last few hours/days. By the time you're done with emails, chats, texts, wall posts, tags, comments etc., you're done. You understand finally, that you shouldn't and cannot wrestle to be in the same dynamic as your life before.
7. Because you choose not to take the dead phone outside, you end up missing on a lot of photo opportunities. Sometimes, you'll ask someone else to take a photo on their phone and send it to you later at home. But in principle -- is that even the same thing? If someone else takes a picture and sends it you, does it even validate your presence there?
After a point though, you stop doing that. You go for a day, two days. You make a mental list of all the places you've been to, as a sort of log, to tell people about it later. But without pictures to prove it, it quickly becomes an exercise in realising how easy it is to lie about it. What stops us from lying about the fabulous places we've been to? Pictures I've realised are just tiny proofs of everything we say.
You text a friend "Dude I'm stuck in traffic, I can't make it in time" and the difference between it being received with hostility and with shared resignation/empathy, is the picture you send next -- as visual proof.
2. When you're in a bookstore or a metro station, and your cousins browse different ends of the huge-ass vastness that is most things in America, you realise how handicapped you are without a phone. If you lose sight of them completely, you can't call them. They can probably call each other and discuss how stupid their cousin is while they search for me.
3. The times when I didn't take my wallet with me, I realise how pointless I am as a subject. Without money or a phone, I am pretty much useless to this economy. It's fascinating roaming the aisles of huge stores that way. Like an empty kernel of possibility, disguised as an interested buyer.
4. You're lost. Even in conversation. Before, when your phone worked and data plans were cheap, you peppered conversations with google search results, quickly accessing information that slipped your mind, putting to rest heated disagreements between people over niggling details, once and for all. Now though, interestingly, conversations are longer. You have to rely on older methods of verifying a fact. You ask around, you postulate, you deduce, you speculate.
The answer is still a google search away, but that doesn't come until hours later, in the comfort and familiarity of your relatives' house where your phone comes to life like a brain-dead monster only under the spell of WiFi.
5. Your fingers don't ache as much.
6. Once you lose the drift of real time -- coupled with time zone differences -- the phone ritual is about catching up. You get WiFi, wait until your phone un-hangs because of all the sudden influx of data, respond to everything you've missed in the last few hours/days. By the time you're done with emails, chats, texts, wall posts, tags, comments etc., you're done. You understand finally, that you shouldn't and cannot wrestle to be in the same dynamic as your life before.
7. Because you choose not to take the dead phone outside, you end up missing on a lot of photo opportunities. Sometimes, you'll ask someone else to take a photo on their phone and send it to you later at home. But in principle -- is that even the same thing? If someone else takes a picture and sends it you, does it even validate your presence there?
After a point though, you stop doing that. You go for a day, two days. You make a mental list of all the places you've been to, as a sort of log, to tell people about it later. But without pictures to prove it, it quickly becomes an exercise in realising how easy it is to lie about it. What stops us from lying about the fabulous places we've been to? Pictures I've realised are just tiny proofs of everything we say.
You text a friend "Dude I'm stuck in traffic, I can't make it in time" and the difference between it being received with hostility and with shared resignation/empathy, is the picture you send next -- as visual proof.
