Lost Connections

The other day, I had been to a water sports park. I am not a water sports freak but I am also not completely hydrophobic. In the excitement of having seen a water body which I could safely get into, and in the hurry to plunge into it, (as if I had never seen so much water before) I got inside...with something I shouldn't have carried with me. Something that I knew wouldn't be able to tolerate so much of water for long, something I knew would fail to resist the water currents and would eventually stop working. I had entered water with my cell phone!

With the mobile phone in my pocket, I entered water and I hardly realized what I had done. It was only after coming up that I realized there was something with me, something unattended, something that didn't even beep to intimate me of its plight in water. Probably it couldn't even ring or give me any indication of what it was going through, of the trouble the water was causing it. It didn't give me the slightest hint of what was happening to it, it just suffocated.

I began hitting the phone, tried switching it on and off, randomly pressed its keys, nothing helped. I had probably taken a very non-technical approach towards technology. I couldn't see the usual glow in its eyes, the light on its face. The luster on its skin was gone, it was looking so pale. It had stopped responding to me the way it did before, forget screaming on top of its voice, as it did when waking me up, it couldn't even beep now. It showed no signs of life...my once-lively little cell phone was lying lifeless, and me...helpless, unable to call.

I remembered how it used to wake me up every morning, I remembered how it used to remind me of every incoming call, I remembered its buzzing, its snoozing, its ringing, its shivering...everything. I remembered how eagerly it waited for me to pick it up, and how it used to ring impatiently on receiving a call. I remembered the glow on its face each time it received a message. I remembered the proud smile its face bore whenever it kept record of all the calls I missed and the child-like disappointment on its face, when I forgot to charge it!

My cell phone was not at all the same...probably my carelessness had taken its life. And that upset me even more. Now I remembered what all it had stored. Some voice recordings, so many songs, quite a lot of pictures, some of which its very own camera had captured. And how could I forget the one 'blue tooth' it had...it made data transfer so easy and free of cost.

Perhaps, those pictures and songs would still be there; or they would not! And the contacts stored in phone memory...they wouldn't be there I realized, the cruel waters had wiped them off. The ones on the sim card would, well, be there, it dawned on me. There was some relief after all, a ray of hope. The sim card could very well be removed, and doing that I would have my cell phone back...well, not really though.

What would any sensible individual have done after this episode? He would have opened up the cell phone, removed the sim card, inserted it in another spare phone and started using it. A new handset with the old number. It was that easy. But the sensitive...rather foolishly sensitive me...I didn't do that. I didn't quite like the idea of snatching the sim card away from the phone; I didn't have the heart to ruthlessly remove the sim and let go of with the handset. The sim card, the data it had, the memories it treasured, once belonged to this cell phone. How could I just snatch them away from it...just because it couldn't function the way it did before?!

I kept the cell phone before me. I gave it the time to get rid of its moisture and come back to life... hoping that it would. While I looked at it lying there, right in front of me, I thought about why I was missing all that it stored. Why was I missing the pictures it stored, why was I missing the recordings it had? It was not that I used to look at them every now and then or that I used to listen to the voice recordings every day. Then why was I missing them now? Probably because, it wasn't all that important for me to see them every now and then. It was sufficient for me to know that they were there and that was all what mattered. In life too there are some such things, some people; you don't see or meet them everyday; but you just know they are there; safe somewhere, and that's all what matters.

Why was I reluctant to remove its sim card and start using my old number, I wondered, not understanding my own thoughts for a while. Was it just the 'foolishly sensitive' me? Or was it...? What was it after all? At times, it so happens that you just don't understand what you are doing and why you are doing it, your own feelings become incomprehensible to you. This was probably one of those times, I thought. While I still looked at my poor cell phone lying there. I began to realize; it wasn't quite true that I didn't want to 'snatch' its sim card. I had probably let the sim card be there, so as to stay disconnected...disconnected from the world around. "Stay disconnected", I had said to myself, for a change; possibly a pleasant one.

We always try to connect with people, identify with their emotions, relate to their feelings, understand their psyche, communicate with them, listen to them, interact with them, respond to them, act and react. We are so busy acting and reacting, that we seldom get a chance to detract ourselves from the surrounding world. How often do we take ourselves away from everyone? In this business of 'connecting with the world', how often do we disconnect ourselves from everything? The non-functional cell phone had given me this golden opportunity; an opportunity to 'disconnect'. No calls received, no calls missed, no unread messages, no reminders, no notes, no drafts, no to-dos, no alarms, no alerts. I was disconnected from the world which lay on the other side of my cell phone; I had disabled an important link in the network that brought me closer to my world. I had cut off the line that bridged the gap between 'me' and the 'world outside' probably to establish a new connection with the world 'inside'.

I spent the next few days with a strange kind of a 'disconnected' feeling. Soon, I began to miss the whole world, my cell phone connected me to. I began to miss the missing link and started waiting for a chance to reestablish communication. And as I saw my cell phone spring back to life, I found myself, all set again, to reconnect with the world I had disconnected from.