An year long affair... with Mobile Phone

For those who know me and have been following this blog know that I never liked to keep a phone in my pocket and have a little "phono-phobia".

Just over an year ago, I finally caved in to the enormous family and friends' pressure and got myself a mobile phone. Moving into another city in 2 days, it was kind of necessary. And now, after an year I have been reduced to be just another regular phone user.

And I must say that the experience hasn't been as bad as I feared. It's been worse!

• The feeling of being connected all the time: This was the most important reason for not keeping a phone. I am  a reserved person and I don't like to be in contact with the world 24x7. I want some personal space and need to cut off from the world from time to time. But ever since acquiring my X2-01, seldom have I parted with it. In fact, I sleep with my phone every night (literally!). Forget weekdays, even weekends are not mine. The number of contacts have increased significantly over the time and so I must now be available round the clock for everyone.

• The anxiety of information: By constant usage, my mind has not ingrained this habit of unconsciously checking the phone every now and then, to see if there are any new messages, phone calls, likes/comments on my latest status update.  In fact, the condition is so worse that I have trouble keeping my phone switched off for a few hours .

• One of the worst forms of distractions: When I didn't have a phone of my own, I used to use a family phone to converse and chat according to My own schedule. But now I need to go according to others' convenience. Which means I would get a phone call or an IM or an SMS in the middle of my working hours. And of course, I can't go without checking them, even if it interrupts my work 'flow'.

• Becoming overly dependent: I use my phone to be in contact with dozens of friends, to see my mails on the go, to tweet/update FB, to learn new words, to google and learn more about something new/news, to write poetry, to listen to music and audio-books, to take occasional interesting snaps, and a million more things. So, if you take away my phone, you take away all those activities from me.

If I have lived without a phone previously, I know I can still survive without it. But I am of the view that a mobile phone is less for you and more for the people known to you.  I also understand I am not the only person struggling with these problems, in fact, virtually every phone user will be able to empathize with me.

Phone is a modern day necessary evil. So, while I can't make it completely go away, I do plan to take a few steps to minimize its damage. Like not checking messages during work hours and to deliberately keep the phone off for a few (pre-scheduled) hours every week. I hope, these steps become successful and things get better in the coming year.

Newspapers: A Habit lost.

From Flick. Under CC License.

I have written about my newspaper reading habit previously. Simply put, I *used* to be addicted to newspapers. There was a time when I would read 3 newspapers daily; and not just skim through them, but actually do the in-depth analysis! But let's not start from here, let's start from the very beginning...

*The Beginning*

I started reading newspaper when I was... well, I don't quite actually remember, but I would have started reading them when I started reading comics (and that was around 4th standard). At that time I would just glance at the headlines her and then quickly jump on to the cool comic strips that would come in the supplementaries.

*Growing up*

When I was in mid school and could read Hindi properly, I actually started reading the inside pages. Well... they weren't exactly inside pages: I would come back from school, go through the front page in 5 minutes and then would just dig myself into the sports page (generally the last one). I loved reading every bit of cricket news, especially since watching all the cricket matches live was a luxury we didn't have then.

*When the addiction started*

By the time I reached high school, I had become addicted to newspapers. In the mean time, we had changed the subscriptions a number of times starting for Hindi daily "Hindustan" and finally had settling with TOI (English) and NBT(Hindi). I would just gorge on the news. First go through English Daily, then the Hindi one and then consume all supplements. And that of course meant, spending at least 1-2 hours daily doing the 'chore'.

*Full Blown*

By the time I left school my addiction to newspapers was at its top. For some reason, we started buying an extra Hindi daily. Not only would I read the news but I also the editorials. Worse, I felt that I needed to store all the *important* articles for future reference. So I set off on my mission to collect and organise all the information in the world that I encounter (Google style). I would cut-paste all the *read-it-later* articles in a register (which I never used and have now disposed). That meant, now I would have to find out at least 3 hours daily for this routine!

*Deaddiction*

When I entered college, I wondered, if it was really necessary to consume and collect so much news and information? I had a large collection of articles lying around to be read *someday*, which was only growing.  So, I decided to stop this insanity. I ended the subscription of 2nd Hindi daily and reduced the time spent on the 1st one (eventually stopping it altogether). I continued reading the English daily but the busy college schedule ensured I won't spent too much time on it either. And I also stopped collecting articles for reading sometime later.

*Full Circle*

Since I started using Net@Home, my reading habit has largely shifted online (which is more distracting and hence time consuming than newspaper). And recently I realised the whole news-addiction pattern was repeating itself. I would spend hours going through blog articles, bookmarking important one, and flagging interesting ones to read later. Hence, I had to give a similar treatment to my RSS feeds, removing seemingly important sources and simplifying the list.

*Current Status*

There used to be a time when I couldn't have my breakfast without a newspaper and couldn't sleep without spending time reading blogs online. Now, I feel sad to say that I don't have time for either. Even reading the headlines and a few posts here and there, has become 'a lot'.

The kind of news (full of negativity: corruption, scandals, scams) that I get to read in newspapers nowadays, has also contributed a lot towards repelling me from news altogether.

*Moral*

Newspapers have vastly improved my reading skills. And it goes without saying I have learnt a lot about the world from the vast amount of information I have consumed through them. But I have also learned a few lessons for life from this habit. It's that we shouldn't try to hold on to the stuffs. There will always be more news, more videos, more music, more movies to watch (even better than the current ones). Just be content with what can consume within the time you have. That would give real peace of mind.
And, by going away from this habit, I have also learnt that there is almost nothing in this world that I can't live without (more about it in some other post).