Daily Times

“Hello, at least talk to me please. I’ll buy you a laptop, a new phone, anything you want. Please respond,” urged the contents of a text from a random number one night. Hello, I was born mute, how to reply dear brother; this is how I envisioned typing back in anger before blocking the number.

The parallel desi (local) world that opens its shutters after sundown was alive, operating phone-to-phone, looking for preys to fall for its charm. As someone who had recently moved to this ‘Breaking News’ nation, I’ve been astonished to discover shady business between strangers over smartphones. This late night Pakistan of cellular networks is brimming with lust, a far cry from the religious cape it dons during the daytime.

In a society where open romantic interaction with the opposite sex is mostly given the thumbs down, all it takes is procuring a number to start your ‘inbox wala luv’ (love in the inbox). Desperate Romeos somehow find their smoldering Juliets, and then they embark on a journey where nude pictures are exchanged, future children are named etc., but not before the requisite I-love-you, of course.

In western world these three words are deemed highly precious, but in South Asia I-love-you sell for three rupees per kilogram, and no one shies away from this ‘commitment’. In fact, most are over-committed, online of course. Up to that point it may seem like harmless fun, but the plot thickens once you realise that the married and the committed ones are the ones are mostly involved in such bold acts. So the seemingly shy Mrs down-the-block or the ‘pious’ uncle in your building may all be hiding a dark secret on their phones. With social media taking on the role of an important character in our lives, cheating on your partner is a click away. Terms of fidelity have been compromised and most practitioners seem to have accepted this as a ‘modern thing’.

Disastrous relationships and quick divorces around us signify that this isn’t what the human heart aches for. Even the strongest amongst us retires as a vulnerable being at night, aching for long-lasting emotional companionship. We lament about the ‘regressive’ dynamics of our forefathers’ marriages. Most of us at some point have asked one of our grandparents, “You mean to say you never met him/her before your wedding?” To our generation it seems as if their marriage was one of compromise, of loving someone forcefully and building a family simply due to lack of freedom or choice. While that may be true at some level, but marriages of the past had one aspect that has gone missing today: resilience. People of the olden times did not give up on each other, they believed in sacrifice and unity, and perhaps these were reasons that helped them traverse through valleys and peaks of life, holding on tight to each other.

We are bombarded daily by visuals that reduce people to mere sexual beings, camera angles focused only on exploiting the body, and with a camera in almost every phone now, people simply ‘sell’ themselves to strangers in a similar packaging. We are being taught that our worth in the world is only measured by conventional physical attractiveness. Our addiction to the virtual world mean sometimes getting up in the middle of the night to check notifications, and feeling worthless in the absence of our smartphone. This restlessness drives us to live online reducing the importance of real world connections: if we are seeing it, eating it, being it, it needs to be announced over the net to feel validated as
a person.

Inboxes today represent rooms where quick connections of the shallow kind are made and broken off, without real-life partners having any inkling of this unscrupulous business. They may be going around pretending to be in a happy and committed relationship with no idea of the various versions of the term ‘baby’ floating around on the password-protected phone of their significant other. Terms of endearment like baby or ‘jaanu’ (sweetheart) come in handy for such transactions, as remembering names of every inbox wala luv would be a bit tedious, no?

With the passage of time and the world turning into a global village, desis jubilantly exchanged most of their eastern values for everything western because for us ‘the gora (white man) is always right’. And this will prove to be an expensive deal in the long run as our core values placed heavy emphasis on the family structure, which to a large degree has collapsed in certain western societies. The kind of families being built today by pillars of a unit who are emotionally absent and easily tempted by ‘sexiness’ of existence will not hold their ground like their antecedents.

As faithfulness is ranked lower and lower collectively, with everyone jumping on the ‘liberal’ wagon, cracks on the walls of our morality and dignity, cultural-wise, should be an area of concern for all. Emotionally secure beings contribute largely to a healthy society, and people who cheat on their partners easily can cheat in friendship, in business and so forth, hence moral corruption will continue to thrive.

Our phones have taken on the role of our conscience today, and the adage ‘look into your conscience can easily be replaced with ‘look into your phone. For this is where the truth of our ‘loving’ relationships lie.

The writer is a freelance columnist with a degree in Cultural Studies and a passion for social observation, especially all things South Asian. She tweets @chainacoffeemug