Cellular Tsunami

IT HAS BEEN nearly a fortnight since I first came across this report in The Indian Express, but find it still hard to wrap my head around it. That a 15-year-old girl should strangle her kid brother two years her junior because he would not part with the phone has left me feeling horrified. The gruesome incident happened in Faridabad, a satellite town in Haryana on the outskirts of Delhi. The siblings were alone at the time, their parents, both employed in a private firm, were at work. Apparently, the girl told the police that her parents preferred her brother, bestowing love on him alone. The cellphone, too, over which the two had wrestled for a while until she strangulated him with her chunni, was presented to the brother. Not to the sister, two years older than him, nor for that matter for sharing by both. Of course, she couldn’t be making up any of the facts she told the police soon after being taken into custody.

Yet, the questions stemming from the grotesque incident concern wider society. Foremost of those is: What sort of sanskars do we give our children? Proper parental care is absolutely necessary for the wholesome growth of children, even if they go to the most expensive English medium school. And the sanskars are imbibed at home, not in school. Our children are being raised with minimal connection with their parents. Why and at what age should children, not yet fit to get a driving licence, be exposed to the cellphone revolution? The country at large seems to be in the thrall of this handheld little gadget packing in a megaton of digital power, both useful and harmful. Everyone, young or old, rural or urban, poor and illiterate or wealthy and city slick, seems thoroughly swamped by the cellular tsunami.

However, we are yet to consider the downside of this digital revolution and its concomitant WhatsApp cottage industry that has gripped the country. Like most technological advances, the ubiquitous cellphone, too, has multiple positives. But it will be a mistake to remain blind to the havoc it is inflicting on normal social discourse, family bonding, and even the mental and physical health of those addicted. Cellphones may have brought families and friends digitally closer but in actual effect, it has widened the physical distance between people. Last, but not least, the larger question is about the decline in societal mores which, thanks to the breakdown of the old family structures nurtured for centuries, have resulted in fragmented single-unit families. Increasingly, with both parents engaged in eking out a living, children lack the care and protection of elders previously freely available.

Here, in the horrendous sibling murder, the parents had left their offspring to their own devices—the problem being that one sibling was minus the only device that the young crave nowadays thanks to the partiality for the male child. I think it is the kind of gruesome incident that someone like Dipankar Gupta, the perceptive sociologist with an interesting turn of phrase, can analyse expertly, putting in perspective our collective lamentation at the sorry turn ‘modern’ India seems to be taking in pursuit of economic progress. Naya Bharat sans a spiritual soul will not be worth it. Or will it?

BY THE TIME these lines appear in print, Rahul Gandhi would have returned from his latest tour of the US, courtesy of the old and reliable family loyalist Sam Pitroda. But if you were really his well-wisher, you would advise him to discard the notion that he is a scholar. On this tour, he droned on and on about the difference between “force” and “power” with the bored audience showing complete disinterest in the tutorial. Also, dispatching an advance team from different states to bus the NRIs to his public fixtures is fruitless. As a report said, the bulk of the audience in New York was “managed” by Revanth Reddy, the Telangana Congress chief. Deepender Singh Hooda from Haryana and senior Congress leaders from Punjab did their bit. Wouldn’t it make better sense for Rahul to amplify his Mumbaiyya one-liner—Muhhabbat ki dukan in a bazaar of hatred—at home and help boost his party’s prospects than give rambling bhashans to NRIs who do not have a vote?

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Virendra Kapoor