Closer but farther still

I am a gen next netizen, born in an era where technology is a fact of life. I am sure you will agree that the biggest impact of this is how we interact with each other. Distance just does not seem to matter anymore. I am always exchanging messages with my bestie who lives a million miles away in snowy Scandinavia. Isn't it fascinating how family and friends are just a few taps on my smartphone away?! My parents used to brag about trunk calls and brick like mobile phones. I think nothing about zoom calls and facetime. Beat that! Don't think the day is far when we will step through a portal in muggy Kolkata and step out in sunny Rio; all in a blink of an eye! Its scary and exciting at the same time.

I don't know about you, but all this information superhighway is not strewn with roses, me thinks. They say distance makes the heart grow fonder. Whoever said that obviously lived in the pre Whatsapp era! If I can eat breakfast with my nani over Facetime, share gossip on Facebook between classes with my cousins in Europe and swap stories over zoom with a pal in Japan, we might as well be all living under the same roof! So when I meet my childhood buddy face to face on her annual trip down from Denmark, there is no suspense. Heck, I already know that she was treated to stale fries on her flight!

When I read "letters from a father to his daughter", I was inspired. They were so well written that you get the feeling of being there, when the events happened. What I could also feel, was the bond between a father and her daughter. Where has the art of writing letters disappeared? In Victorian novels, star struck lovers would wait for letters with bated breath; how else would love have bloomed in those days? We shared the anxiety of worried mothers in countless war movies, waiting for notes from their dear sons, hastily penned between bloody skirmishes. Can you even begin to feel what they felt when they saw the postman approach? I think WhatsApp and Gmail have made us less human, even if, thanks to these, the world is a smaller place. We take communication for granted, we share more information than we need to, but it does not bring us any closer. A video call is convenient, but has none of the intimacy of a cup of tea shared by two lifelong friends in the balcony on a rainy afternoon.