Gone are those days when people used to remember the telephone numbers of their dear ones. In this age of tablets and smartphones, you just collect a number, save it to your device and forget about it. And if you are a bit geeky, you might sync the contacts of your device to your google account or any such platform. But what if your device crashes and you lose all your important contacts? And to add to your horror, you do not get back your contacts even in google as you had them improperly synced (you might get disconnected from the net while you were syncing and you might have thought that you had successfully completed syncing!).

   Well, this unfortunate incident happened with me today and I was like…OMG! What am I gonna do now?!. All I could remember were the numbers of my parents, not even my brother’s! Tensed and horrified, I thought of updating my facebook status as “Hey guys! I just lost all my contacts, Please inbox me your numbers…”. But just a couple of days back, I deactivated my facebook account and resolved to keep it deactivated for some time (quite a long time if I can). So I decided not to reactivate my account and that ‘facebook idea’ was instantly dropped.

   It was then I felt how dependent we have become in technology today. A device that fits in our palms is our doorway to the world. Friends, relatives, news, social networking, games, lifestyle, everything! Everything seems to be hidden in that device and all our problems can be solved with that device (although it is also the root of many problems). Without the smartphone, life almost seems paralysed today.

  Leave out the social networking and games apart. Those may not be very important to everyone. But what about the important contact numbers, email addresses and emails?

   Now you do not carry a pocket telephone diary or notepad to jot down every telephone number or email id like people used to do a decade ago. You are left to your smartphone for

that option. And when this smartphone of mine crashed today, it seemed as if my world turned topsy-turvy. Now there is no way I can get back those numbers rather than collecting them from my friends again. With a big bunch of friends around, this will be a herculean task for me now. Some contacts will be lost forever, as I am not that intelligent to recall each and every person who existed in my phone’s contacts.

   And that is how I realised today how losing the contacts is indeed a big deal. You are certainly going to suffer for technical mishaps in this tech enslaved world today, if you are one of the dependents on the modern tech marvels!

 

© Barnadhya Rwitam Sharma

Images courtesy: Google, Rediff