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SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2015° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
UNPLUG | NATASHA BADHWAR
A TECHNOLOGY ‘CHOWKIDAR’ AT HOME
If you want creative pauses, daydreaming and imaginary friends for your child, keep out superfluous technology NATASHA BADHWAR
Reconnect: ‘It’s not so much the technology as it is the onslaught of manipulative and mindless content that we reject’.
M
Mamma, you are checking your phone like I put my thumb in my mouth,” said my six-year-old daughter. Both of us are sitting on the floor putting a 200-piece jigsaw puzzle together. She is right. Bang on. My smartphone is my pacifier. I check my phone compulsively when I am stressed, when I want to disappear. Something else is on my mind right now, and the mild frustration of having to pay full attention to the moment I am in is making me reach for my drink. I mean my smartphone. Behind the shiny surface and multiple apps on my iPhone is dull and infuriating content interspersed with some shiny, sparkly, funny stuff. I am addicted to searching for it on the random timelines of my Facebook and Twitter profiles. It is my drug. I am not overtly stressed. Perhaps something or someone is coming on too strong and I feel vulnerable. Perhaps I am overcommitted. I have not aced time management. I want to vanish. Not be here or there. I want to be online, where I can be connected to people who are not here, so I can temporarily disconnect from the people who are physically here. I browse on my smartphone a lot less when I am alone. I reach for it a lot more when there are lots of people at home. Sometimes it really is like the stiff drink I
might have hidden behind the houseplants. I take a quick sip to keep the buzz in my head. My husband often calls himself a Luddite. Afzal uses his iPhone only to make phone calls. Besides the car and his phone, the gadget he uses the most on any given day is usually the electric mosquito swatter. Have you ever used one? The crackly sound of a mosquito being electrocuted in mid-flight is addictive. Even mosquitoes are drawn to it, I think. We got rid of television in our home in the early years of our marriage. Between work, home, babies and guests, I had no time for it. My work involved creating and watching television all the time. I didn’t need more of the same at home. If it was ever switched on at home, Afzal would stare at the TV screen like a deer trapped in headlights. Out of sight, out of mind worked for us when we were home together. Despite my own intense love relationship with gadgets—computer, cameras, smartphone and the minielectric food chopper—I am the selfappointed tech chowkidar (watchman) in our home. I am the security guard who moderates the access of technology to our family spaces. In the process of making checks, I often summarily delay the entry of bona fide candidates. My first iPhone lay in its case for over a year before I got a SIM card for it. Our children were still babies, and I knew that I must delay this inevitable love affair. Sometimes I am compelled to confiscate the latest gadget and keep it only for myself. Purely for professional reasons, of course. As a parent, it is critical for me to keep superfluous technology out of our lives. There are so many of us already in our home: three busy children under the age of 13 and two grown-up children masquerading as their parents. We barely listen to each other. We are often way behind in keeping track of each other’s creative milestones. Someone has learnt a new poem, another has made a drawing or taken a photograph, a third has had a dramatic encounter with someone new, and we all need some time to share our experiences with each other.
WE ARE FREE TO DISCOVER AND RELATE WITH OUR INNER AND OUTER WORLD AT OUR OWN PACE. WE CAN PICK AND CHOOSE
So we do things that may seem odd to other families. We are an iPad-free home. We don’t have a cable TV connection. We have no video game consoles. Till four months ago we did not have Wi-Fi at home. I used a slow and fragile dongle to dial-up when I needed to. We don’t watch the latest films. None of us has seen an Indian Premier League match. We go to doctors’ waiting rooms and ask for the TV remote first. We switch from the usual news channel to wildlife programming. We watch films and videos of our choice on DVDs and via pen drives. No advertisements play in our home. It’s not so much the technology as it is the onslaught of manipulative and mindless content that we reject. None of us can recognize Taylor Swift, Rohit Sharma or Sunny Leone (I had to google a few keywords to recall Rohit and Sunny’s names for this sentence). No one in my family can tell you what “GoT” stands for. We miss entire trends sometimes, but they die out so soon that you wouldn’t really find out that we did not know what you thought we must have known when it was the thing to know. We seem as smart and well-informed as our peers. It has not been very difficult to pull this off. Let me throw in some jargon. I do not want us to be a family of Western consumerist culture addicted anglophones. We don’t want to find ourselves scavenging for comfort amid the clutter and the garbage of physical and digital possessions that have no shelf value. I want variety in our lives. Slowness. Pauses. Daydreaming and imaginary friends. I don’t want to prepare our children for the “real world”. I want us and them to know that we can create the world we want to live in. We don’t have to fit into pre-fabricated moulds. We are free to discover and relate with our inner and outer world at our own pace. We can pick and choose. This is real life. Two weeks ago we attended a live music concert in New Delhi at which Harpreet, a young musician, sang soulful Punjabi folk and semi-classical songs to mark the release of his first album, Ajab
Ishq Maati Da. Our children had not been entirely convinced that they wanted to attend this. Their grandparents’ home where they could play video games and watch TV had seemed more attractive and relaxing. There was no iPad in the car as we negotiated rush-hour traffic to reach the venue. The children did not have smartphones to fiddle with as we took our seats and waited for the programme to start. They sat among strangers and adults and waited for the lights to dim and the music to start. We stayed connected and attentive to each other. In the last two weeks, Aliza, our 10year-old DJ, has repeatedly chosen to play the same songs by Harpreet in the car and at home. It is not “cool” to be hooked to this music at their age, but the act of hearing it live has touched them. They engage with the lyrics, the vocals and the guitar riffs. Could I have planned this deep connect between the children and this music? Did I know what the outcome would be when I was being the ruthless chowkidar and controlling everyone’s choices? I didn’t, but I still take the risk of boring them regularly with the confidence that lying fallow will lead to fertile. Learning takes time. Don’t give up your ownership and entitlement over your own time. Less is more. It allows us to engage deeply with what we have chosen rather than skimming over things because there is too much to catch up with. When we create the deliberate absence of easy distractions in our children’s life, it means that we have to fill these spaces with our own presence. We entertain each other. We create and perform the content that would otherwise be available via gadgets. It means that I have to be my own watchman. I switch off notifications and put away my own smartphone. This was my plan all along. Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker, media trainer and mother of three. She writes a fortnightly column on family and relationships. Write to Natasha at natasha.badhwar@gmail.com