Navigating life sans a smartphone
First, they said keeping your smartphone under your pillow at night carries radiation risks. So, I moved it to a nightstand a little distance away from my bed. Then they said don’t take recourse to the blue light of your smartphone on sleepless nights, so I would switch on the bedside lamp, pull the bookmark off the page of the book I was currently reading, and start to read. Then lifestyle coaches insisted that reaching for that smartphone first thing in the morning isn’t the best way to start the day, so I scrupulously avoided looking at my Flip6 till I had finished my set of stretches.
We need to detach from our devices, I would tell friends sagely. Absolutely, friends would intone even as they checked their WhatsApp messages intently.
Now the thing is, I have a phone jinx. Every new phone either keels over and dies on me within weeks of purchasing it, or the screen would suddenly seize. I would take it to the servicing centre where I would be told it has to be re-set, do I have my data stored somewhere safely. Long story short, all efforts at restoring back-up data would invariably fail. A fresh start, each time.
Which is how I learned to be philosophical about my lost data. Indeed, I became proud of the fact that I could survive the loss of well-written articles, starred messages of both affection and ire that I wanted to keep forever and a day (why, I don’t know), and my priceless collection of recipes and culinary tips scrounged from some obscure sites on the net. Of course, a sieve-like memory helped a lot in the healing process.
Last month, I got myself a new phone. Sure enough, two weeks down, my phone screen froze. Brand new phone, a return to Android after almost two decades of joy with an Apple device, but that’s another story.
So, I trotted off to the Service Centre. It has to be repaired and re-set, they said. Had I saved everything? Again, there was mysteriously nothing to save. The hell with it, I said, and gave in my phone. And no, I had no back-up phone.
The next four days were days of dismay and deprivation. No baking, the recipes were lost. No UPI payments for obvious reasons. No sending anything across town via a delivery app. Dashitall, no walks in the park listening to the best of Fleetwood Mac because Spotify was gone. I saw a gorgeous fuschia-coloured wildflower on a hedge but had no app at hand to identify it. I needed eggs and milk urgently but again, no app to order them. I needed to de-stress with a round of 85 forms of Tai Chi but Sifu’s video of the same, stored on my smartphone, was gone. When I headed out, no Ola or Uber for me, I’d walk to the auto rank. One particularly low moment was when I realised I’d gone off my usual email trail and stored some work on my phone. That too had vanished.
There was no getting around it, I navigated much of my life via the smartphone. Doing without one was not impossible but it was quite hard.
When Pico Iyer’s house burned down to the ground in California, he had to re-set his thinking about life. Me, I’ve come to the conclusion that in case of fire, all I need to rescue is my smartphone. And that’s the honest truth.
Sheila Kumar
Author
kumar.sheila@gmail.com