August 3rd

Like everyone else, on this worldwide celebrated day, I wished my friends a happy Friendship Day and was replying to the wishes that came in. But as the day went on I remembered something that my English teacher in high school told us. She pointed out that relationships these days are losing their depth and meaning. People wish each other on social networks, be it on their birthdays, anniversaries, Friendship Day, Mothers’ Day and so on……..but do these wishes mean anything??? Most of the time it’s just like a formality, you know, like you have a notification on your wall and then only you realize it’s someone’s birthday and wish them (these are not her exact words). And even worse than this is when people post “HBD” for birthday wishes. If one does not mean it from the depths of their heart, then I suggest one should not pretend to care about such things and post halfheartedly.

The advent of technology, especially internet, seems to have created some sort of black hole in human relationships. To quote Albert Einstein, “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” If we give this a proper thought, we can see that there is a lot of truth in this. It’s true that it is convenient and not so much time consuming to send messages on Facebook, Wechat, and Whatsapp. We can contact many people at the same time and our works are completed efficiently. And it’s all good when it comes to our work. But we are missing the bigger picture here, more than our job and our social status it’s our social relationships that help us get through with our lives. It doesn't matter if you are an engineer, a doctor, the CEO of some company or some big shot; in the end it’s the relations that you have that will help you through the ups and downs of life. One may be able to increase the number of friends on Facebook and Myspace, followers on Twitter and Instagram, subscribers on Youtube, but remember that only a handful will show up at your funeral.

Even I am a victim of social network and I admit that I feel guilty writing all this about the internet. But deep down inside me, ever since my childhood, I have been fascinated by communications through handwritten letters and even to this day I think it’s a great way to show how much someone means to us. The time we spend writing the letter is, in itself a testimony of our feelings for the person we are writing to. Then there is the content of the letter. I don’t think anyone would waste their precious time writing nonsense. We think about what we are writing and give every sentence a thought before writing it down because we don’t want to screw up our relation. And think about it, why would we write letters to people just for the sake of it like on these social sites? This ultimately helps us to separate the people we really care about and mean something to us from the ones we have just for numbers. This may not bring any improvement to the number of people during the funeral (actually the number don’t even matter since we would already be dead and can’t see who all are there). But knowing that people will turn up to pay homage to us with genuine feelings when we die sure sounds nice to me.

Not just that, to save time we tend to write short forms of words which sometimes don’t even mean anything (you can that say I’m blowing my own trumpet, but I never use short form when chatting). This makes everything that was taught to us in school just a waste of time and resources. This has a very bad effect especially for the people who are still attending schools and colleges. And people are blaming poetry and grammar questions for the poor performance of students in last year’s board exams.

Sometimes I wish that communicating through hand written letters becomes a trend again, but then again when I look at my own handwriting I’m like naaahhh………but the alternate for people like me (if there are any) would be E-mail. They are just like letters except for the fact that they are typed instead of written and are more convenient.

Lastly I would like to request my readers to give this a thought. It may or may not be helpful to you but if you share it with someone else may be it can help them change a little………