Arshid Malik
The more we advance as a people in terms of scientific knowhow and high end technology the more distant the joy of life seems to be. Our behaviours and attitudes are somehow too deeply influenced by machines and scientific automation and that too in a negative sense. Science, I have come to believe, takes the rhythm out of life and installs a monotonous drumming noise into our existence. I am not exactly against scientific advances but against the pace at which we are incorporating them into our day to day lives.
I would cite an example as to how science takes the fervour out of life. Of recent there was a time when we had no telephones or cell phones. One was supposed to visit relatives and friends in order to enquire about their good health and wellbeing. Such instances led to small rendezvous revolving around tea, local bakery and heart warming talk.
While one was leaving, the relatives or acquaintances would see you off to the door and in warmer cases to the system of transport one was plying. If women folk were involved then it would be a “congregation of sorts” slipping into hours of intriguing talk, waning with the approach of every other public transport carrier. This is what I would like to call “animation”. These days when we need to enquire of a friend, all we afford to do is pick up our cell phone, dial the number desired to be reached and talk hurriedly in a business-like tone. The “end call” button ends it all. There is no life in the conversations that we have. No animation, I should say.
Sometimes some or all of the inventions of science appear futile to me. We were better off with what nature had in store for us. This belief of mine was further strengthened when I decided to take long walks in the mornings and the evenings, which is quite unprecedented of me as most of the times I am not more than a sack-full of bones and flesh sipping tea and nibbling cookies. I was pining for the regular vehicle which ships me to office, as soon as the kilometres of walking turned my knees jelly, but slowly and steadily I got over the mental barriers that were blocking my tryst with nature.
It has been two weeks now, and I am holding steady. My long walks take me places; I see the world around me, I breathe slower; I feel the earth, the pebbles which pinch my sole and every morning and evening I learn new things about living and dying. I am happy that I have overcome my fixation with mechanical devices that ship people around. I am better off and healthier. I am more relaxed and get a good night’s sleep.
There are so many things that we miss while we are stuck in the “dark” schemes of science, the sucking tentacles of technology. A man or a woman watching television (which happens to be an addiction in today’s world) can’t see anything else. People dying outside the cosy corridors of the ardent television watchers are never a problem for the latter. The world goes by, by leaps and bounds, as the TV addicts stay glued to the fluorescence of the Idiot Box. It takes us away from all that we are supposed to be and do. Almost every invention that has advanced us into a scientific age has, at the same time, receded us into oblivion.
