A day without the Internet

There comes a time when a blogger or a writer is no longer capable of keeping in control that urge to write. Your mental ramblings in a situation that is either grotesque or somewhat peculiar, force you to write down a testament of all that is going on. The eeriness of the mellowing air and the grogginess in your crumbled mind, even they don't have the power to keep your writing instinct at abeyance. You know it does not make any sense and what you'd write down would eventually become another victim of the lack of traffic from which your blog suffers. But, you still want to write, not because of that feeling, not because of those circumstances but because writing is no longer a passion, it has become a ravenous desideratum. You can swivel and do everything possible to move away, but as it turns out, your conscience was never entirely in your control.

So, amidst this situation, here I am in a hilly and lusciously green area of Mumbai. One that seems to have an enormous proclivity to vest you in itself and one where the ingeniously carved landscapes and harrowing pathways are so exorbitantly arranged, that you develop genuine appreciation for it. But wait, natural and architectural properties are impressive but what about what fuels up a blogger ? This place does not have any connectivity in regard of my cellphone and my USB dongle network. Above all, all other viable networks get an exuberant connectivity. As it turns out, I've arrived here today, and today itself some network issues have crept in the nearby network transmission systems. So, as fate may have it, an Internet hungry man is compelled to sit here in this simple and sober room with the most parsimonious of constituents and with windows that face the most picturesque scene you're likely to imagine in Mumbai city.

Here I am, with my inadvertent partner - my laptop, with my cellphone, with a few bags surrounding me, two doors, one opening to a hallway and other to a balcony, 2 windows which when opened are capable of entwining you in the aroma of the scent of night, a bedding, a few pairs of shoes, a few lights, a fan, a few wall mounted cupboards and racks, a chair with basic stuff, and an All Out machine with Good Knight liquid . One must be wondering that you've gotta be nuts to mention even the most frugal of things in a scene but as it turns out, I've got nothing else to notice. I have the two things which till a few hours ago allowed me to connect to the rest of the world – my cell which has a 3G connection and my laptop for which I have a USB dongle. But now, here I lay, secluded from the rest of my world, with the bliss of nature, but away from the bliss which silicon valley and its entrepreneurs have bequeathed upon me since 1995.

It's not that I gave up straightaway. I searched for networks, I used the cord extension of my dongle, I tried accessing a prospective Wi-Fi network which the households above me or below me might be using. You know what, I am not erudite enough to break into their networks but I simply had this rapacious craving to see a network signal with a few bars on. Just that very feeling that you have a network around you, those surreptitious waves hovering around you, their mellifluous crests and troughs evangelizing your thoughts. But alas ! , there are no active Wi-Fi networks as of now. After having tried every single thing in my quiver of acquainted knowledge, I just kept viewing and savoring the static content from Facebook and a few more pages that were opened a little while ago when I had access to the Internet. I couldn't load comments, which was obvious, I couldn't load new Facebook notifications and messages, The Chat box kept saying “Disconnected”. Then I turned to my Gmail page. Last mail was loaded at 12:24 AM on the same day. Of course, it was just a matter of a little while ago when my dongle was seething with all those network bars. Even though I had read all mails, I opened them again as they were still in cache and for that ephemeral instance, I devoured the magic that is manifested in opening mails.

I moved on, kept tethering to the cellphone screen to see any sign of network. Wait ! It shows one bar, no 3G but one bar, maybe more will follow. Yeah ! 2 bars now, 3,4,5 and finally it has all of them. I couldn't help but thank god, the magnanimous, the prescient and the all powerful god for attending to my plight and finally putting an end to my tribulation. I no longer felt being captive. I enjoyed those mighty sumptuous bars as their number kept decreasing and then increasing every 2 seconds. I was finally brought out of the gallows, I was set free. And then, then it shuddered me again. All bars went away in the whip of a second. No more bars and situation returned to where it all started. I still don't know if it happened for real or if it was a preposterous imagination. I glued my eyes to the screen of my cell so that I could find that out for myself. 5 minutes, no network, 10 minutes, no sign yet. I had to unlock it again and again as the automatic lock triggered after every few seconds of inactivity. The exercise was futile.

And it was then that I finally decided that this moment, this predicament, shall not go in vain. That it shall form the 40th post and perhaps the 12th or so ludicrous post of what is supposedly my alter ego - my blog. I knew that blogging at this point of time and then reaping the benefits of those gigantic 4 hits that follow every hour was not possible, not now at least. So I opened a slate which can copy a blog when it comes to the frolic that comes in undulating typing – The LibreOffice. As I wrote this, I did not blog this in the conventional sense. After all, blogs are about being all connected all the time. Blogger keeps saving your draft every now and then and so did this word processor. But whereas blogger saves it on its servers, this processor saves it on my own machine. For the purpose of writing this account, saving it first on my machine made more sense as it bears a true testimony to the times we've spend here.

For the first time, I blog without the officiousness of Facebook's frequent notification sounds, without the mail refreshing actions that I execute after every few minutes, without the twitter feed check out which I do after every paragraph and without the Indivine link posting and Facebook link posting that I always do subsequent to writing a blog post. As it turns out, writing this blog required the minimal of effort. Posting would require a little flex of fingers later on but as of now, writing ensued like flow in a high speed pipe. Nothing to worry about, no consideration about tags, no concerns about how to create a promotion description of the post, nothing. This was somewhere between pristine writing and prospective blogging. I've drawn a clear line of demarcation between two actions that were always supposed to be separate but which always mix up. This time, I was made to do the former. I could take a few pictures of the situation to describe it more vehemently, but I don't have the data cable to transfer pictures to the laptop right now and to inculcate them in this post. I can obviously do that later but once this post is finalized now at this point of time, I don't want anything to deprive it of its originality. It is a standalone account of this time when I actually felt some kind of lecherie for an Internet connection. I don't have a connection now but I'll get one any moment And eventually this blog post too will make its way. Because no matter what happens, there's connectivity at the end of every secluded tunnel ! This is where this account ends. A brief description of how I spent nearly a day that hereby ends with an unusual fanaticism, and A day without the Internet!

June 4, 2013

11:39 PM IST

                                                                            Mumbai City