About 20 years ago, there used to be a lady living somewhere in our neighbourhood who used to walk alone at a specific time every evening talking at high pitch, fast paced, highly animated and no one next to her…our neighbours said she had some mental disorder.

Fast forward 15 years from then, as I enter an elevator in a mall I see a good looking, well dressed man, alone, talking at high pitch, fast paced, highly animated gesturing with both his hands facing the wall…he’s called tech savvy, he was using his bluetooth hands free, mobile headset.

Sometimes I have literally felt like an alien when I see 19 out the 20 people around me in a bus busy with their gadgets and me being the only one switching my gaze from one to the other bemused. Going further with my observations, understandably, I see the level of comfort in staying in this state improve down the generations just as the natural progression we see with handling gizmos. The generation of the 90s late Gen-Y and early Gen-Zs who are the youngest to enter the workforce have almost transformed into a species of Homo Zappiens. They zap between identies online donning a new avatar for every profile online. In fact, even if you live in the same house with them, or in the same aisle at work the best possibility of grabbing their attention will be by leaving a ‘post’ or ‘invite’ online than attempting to strike a live conversation with them. Its so amazing to see the dexterity with which this generation could type a ‘long’ Short Message Service (SMS) text in their phones just by jabbing their thumbs into the little keypad involuntarily with their eyes busy on something else. My dad finds it so hard to avoid pressing 4 keys at a time with full concentration on the keypad and screen, his generation had a technological shock when telephones swiched from rotor dialling to push buttons. I lie in between, slow but comfortable with the keypad and all the menu options and not a frequent user of SMS or even the mobile phone.

It’s become a common scene in urban life today and to a good degree in rural set-ups too that when people are alone for even a short while flip out a gadget and get connected to someone elsewhere either engaging through a telephone call, SMS texting or through social networking web-sites, thanks to the never ending technological innovations. Though they enable us to multi-task and complete a lot of things while on the go I also notice that it is leading to people miss out the pleasure of having a conversation with a stranger, miss opportunities of being forced out of the comfort zone leading to what I call ‘lateral learning’ by mere sharing of experiences which could be one of the little things that’s helped our species evolve to where we are.

Something seems to be not right when people sharing a physical space fail to communicate with each other and individually go to their ‘Contact list’ for a conversation. Though the quality of living is improving over the years the quality of human communication seems to be detiriorating. If we decide to interact only with people who are part of our ‘(online) community’ or share the same ‘interests’ and who are introduced to us only by a common friend then we are missing something…and that something is definitely not available online.