A little slower, if you please!

About twenty five years ago, long before mobile phones and the internet became ubiquitous, I wrote an essay about whether the relentless speeding up of life is doing us much good. I put it up among the earliest posts when I began writing this blog.

In my newspaper today, I found Professor Samantak Das of  Jadavpur University warning and lamenting about what is happening to us in a world that is always ‘connected’, and everybody is always busy and determined to form and voice instant opinions on everything. I had a very strong sense of déjà vu. These are things that I have noted and commented upon long ago, when I was still a young man, and unlike Das, who might be about my age, I made up my mind about how to handle the situation long ago too, much before mobiles and the Net apparently ‘revolutionized’ our lives. Have very few friends, do not stay connected all the time except to the handful of people who really matter, give yourself time to think before opening your mouth, and, heeding advice given more than four hundred years ago, ‘give every man thy ear but few thy voice’. Actually, in my case, it’s ‘give few men thy ear and even fewer thy voice’ – I stopped talking unless I am getting paid years ago.  While travelling in the US almost thirty years back and meeting a lot of very diferent kinds of people, from factory workers to doctors and policemen and teachers, journalists and university scientists, it occurred to me that I could have meaningful, thought-provoking conversations only with folks below ten and above seventy. If anything, that is what has come to India with a vengeance. As Shakespeare also said, and I have listened, ‘how every fool can play upon the word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none only but parrots.’ Want to bet that our internet era wouldn’t have surprised him?

There are many kinds of ‘busy’ men, with or without phones. There are the Zomato/Amazon delivery boys. I thank Providence every day that I wasn’t required to make a living that way. There are cabinet ministers and business tycoons, who handle great affairs all the time. I am glad I wasn’t chosen for a life like that: I have greatly enjoyed spending my time mostly my way, at peace, at leisure, all by myself and a few loved ones. And then there’s the most numerous, most contemptible aam admi, with all the time in the world, dressing up, partying, boozing, quarrelling, zooming about on bikes, shopping, obsessing about acne or children’s marks, living utterly empty lives of the mind, furiously 'busy' spewing all their filth all over the internet. Imagine a wise Martian monitoring our radio waves. What conclusion would he draw about the nature and content of our ‘civilization’?

Hermits have the best lives, I have often thought. And in this day and age, when you cannot withdraw to lonely hills and forests, you can live a good life only if you can make a hermitage of your own mind…

Professor Das has said that it is important to think. I have been a compulsive thinker all my life; if anything I think too much (a trait that my daughter has inherited!), and of late I have been consciously trying to revv down, to let my mind rest now and then. So his lament makes me smile wryly.

But in an age when even great policy matters are being decided and disseminated instantaneously via twitter, can civilization, or democracy (as distinct from majoritarian tyranny) or even sanity survive? In an age when most 'educated' people, such as doctors and engineers, won't even understand what that question means?