Opinion: Navigating life sans a smartphone

Surving 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`d 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 s.phone first thing in the morning isn’t the best way to start the day, so I scrupulously avoided looking at my Flip6 till I`d finished my set of stretches.

We need to detach from our devices, I`d 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 ether keels over and dies on me within weeks of purchasing it. Or the screen would suddenly seize, I`d take it to the Servicing Centre where I`d be told it has to be reset, 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.

New phone, old story

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 reset, 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 destress with a round of 85 forms of Tai Chi but Sifu`s video of the same, stored on my s.phone, 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 s.phone. 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 s.phone. And that`s the honest truth.

https://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/voices/2024/Dec/21/navigating-life-sans-a-smartphone

This ran in the Sunday Express magazine of 21 December 2024.

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