Dear Government,
I hope this letter finds you in the pink of health. Which, most likely, you are, because your convoy doesn’t face traffic. We do. But we understand, you’re important, you have to reach the airport on time. We’re not complaining, we’re simply honking in Jubilee Hills.
I mean, if we start complaining, then we have the floods to complain about — the ones caused by the trees you cut down. For that, we protested, we complained. But we never hated you. Because that’s how it goes in any other state. We know we’re doing better. But off late, our feelings are shifting from ‘bleh’ to ‘arrgh’. And this is not good.
Cut our trees? That’s your profession, we know. Cut our power? That’s your passion, sure. But how dare you cut… our internet?
Are you my parents? Did I do something wrong? Vote wrongly, maybe?
Yes, we understand there was a disaster. Yes, we understand you had to prevent electrocution. But tell me honestly — when was the last time an internet cable killed a man? Internet cables can only kill time, not people.
Okay, now you’ll say your guys didn’t know which cable was which, so they cut everything. Fine. But then next time there’s a bomb threat in Hyderabad, and your person in charge has to choose red wire or blue wire — are you saying it’s okay if he cuts both, and then lives happily ever after… in heaven?
Please note: it’s not ‘just another wire’. By cutting it, you cut the very thing that funds your revenue. It’s like chopping down banana trees because one guy slipped on a peel. That tax money — which converts into your salary but never into taxpayer satisfaction — comes from Gautam from TCS, who gives you a 30% cut after working
11 hours wearing half-pants below the laptop screen and a fake smile on his chin. He loses his job — you get no meat.
Internet is not just a need. It is a want, and it is a drug. And honestly, if The Eagle team treated internet addiction as a real problem, they wouldn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it. They’d have to add vultures and owls to the squad.
Bottom line: like air, internet has to be there all the time. Yeah, we have 5G, but not all corners get 5G. And watching Black Mirror in 240p is a Black Mirror episode in itself.
Also, the reason we’re good citizens is because we have the internet. You do something, some guy makes a reel, we like, share, laugh, and move on. But without WiFi, the city is in withdrawal — fidgety, cranky. Sure, we can ‘detox’ for a bit, but only after the internet comes back and in that offline gap, people start thinking: Who did this to us? You don’t want your face in those imaginations.
I get it, it’s not the government directly. You hired a guy, who told a guy, who told another guy to take care of electricity — who was further delegated to ‘cut the wires’. But that wire was very important. Just tell your folks: the internet wire is the most important wire in the city.
Thank you,
Someone who wrote this article on paper like it’s 1992.
Sandesh
@msgfromsandesh
(This comedian is here to tell funny stories about Hyderabad)
(The writer’s views are his own)