Can we ever slow down in the age of smartphones?

I had never read Walden but I knew about it. The American transcendentalist writer built a little cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, amidst woodland that was owned by fellow writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Walden was his account of his life there, immersed in nature, away from what he called “over civilisation".

I had not done anything remotely as radical. I was in Kolkata, about as un-Walden a place as one could imagine. But I had been posting a series of pictures from our backyard on social media. My social media feed had “gone Walden", according to my bemused friend.

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My backyard was a hub of activity. Little striped grey squirrels scurried up and down the trees chirruping constantly, monopolising the bird feeder. Grey-pink doves would peck at the ground near the feeder eating what the squirrels dropped in their greedy haste. The large ungainly kubo or crow pheasant with spooky red eyes and shiny black and brown plumage plodded clumsily along the bigger branches of the mango tree while dusty brown yellow-billed babblers, the so-called seven brothers, squabbled incessantly on the ground. Sometimes if I was lucky, I would spot a mongoose in the overgrown empty plot behind the house or a snake sunning itself on our wall. I even learnt to identify the insects—jewel bugs, shiny metallic green with black polka dots, chocolate soldier butterflies and giant African snails.

This was literally my own backyard. I just had never stopped to look or listen before. But confined to home because of sudden illness and told to rest, I started to pay attention. Part of it admittedly was social-media driven. As social life and travel ground to a halt, I was forced to look for content closer to home. This was not so unlike the covid lockdown except then the whole world had slowed down. Now it was just me.

Slow down, the doctor had advised, try to avoid stress. That is easier said than done. As a child, one of my favourite Rabindranath Tagore stories was the play The Post Office. It was about a little boy named Amal, confined to his home by some unnamed illness. His world was whatever and whoever passed by his window—the yogurt seller, the watchman, a little girl named Sudha. But the story was also about the power of imagination. Amal could go nowhere but he dreamt up new worlds based on the stories he would hear. He imagined what the yogurt seller’s village looked like—a road covered with brick-red dust, old banyan trees, cows grazing on the gentle slopes of low hills, women in red saris filling pitchers with water from the Shamli river.

Yogurt seller: You are exactly right. You must have been to my village at some point.

Amal: Believe me I have never been anywhere. The physician has forbidden me from leaving the house. But if he lets me go someday, will you take me to your village?

The poet Meena Alexander wrote on digital literary magazine Words Without Borders about how as a child growing up in Kerala, she and her cousins staged the play at their family home, copying their lines assiduously from a faded Macmillan first edition of the play that belonged to her grandmother. Decades later she said some lines were still etched in her memory.

Amal: I want to see everything, everything there is to see… Those faraway hills, I would love to cross over them.

The wonder of the play was how Amal’s mind roamed freely even though his body was confined to his bed by the window. Perhaps his mind roamed that freely precisely because his body could not. Alexander wrote that in 1942 the children of an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto put on the play. Asked why he had chosen that play, the director Janusz Korczak said, “We must all learn to face the angel of death." Three weeks later, Korczak and the children in the orphanage were all taken to the Treblinka death camp.

Of course now even when we are confined at home, unlike Amal, we have smartphones handy. While life might physically slow down, the phone relentlessly beeps and pings, an orchestra of manufactured busy-ness. There are Spelling Bees and Wordles to solve, Facebook statuses to update, WhatsApp forwards to read and if all else fails, we can keep scrolling through Instagram as its algorithm keeps feeding us catnip for the idle mind. In fact, after the recent bout of illness, as I felt a bit better, my first thought was “I’ve lost my Wordle streak." A friend who belongs to the same Wordle WhatsApp group as me, said sheepishly while checking in on me “I also thought fleetingly about the streak when I heard the news."

When I was a boy, I was a bit sickly. I would often have to miss school because I was sick. My favourite sick toy was a small wooden doll. It was a just a head on a long stick and there were multicoloured wooden rings of different sizes that you could stack on the pole to give the head a body. I could spend hours lying in bed, trying to create different body shapes with the rings. Each permutation made for a new character. Each new character came with new stories.

That doll has long been retired. In a world of smartphones, it would feel antiquated and limited in scope anyway. Instead, the smartphone has become not just a companion but a marker of our existence. Recently a friend in San Francisco and her partner suddenly disappeared from social media. After my WhatsApp message remained undelivered for days, I started worrying. I checked both their social media feeds and saw there were no posts after a certain date. I knew they were going on a safari sometime soon but that should have meant their social media would be flooded with pictures of lions and giraffes. Instead, aliens seemed to have abducted them. After a week, they surfaced. They had gone camping at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, without Wi-Fi or internet. It begged the eternal question of our age—if you went to the bottom of a natural wonder but could not post an Instagram story about it, did you really go? I realised that might have been more slowing down than I was ready to handle.

In fact, how much do we really slow down when we remain tethered to the phone? I might physically not be running from place to place and juggling social events but I remain at the beck and call of the phone. Unlike Amal, I do not use slow down time to talk to people passing by and hear their stories. I don’t lie in bed and imagine new worlds with the help of a little wooden doll and its pastel coloured rings. Time stretches but the phone keeps filling it.

So I resolutely put the phone aside and picked up a “low-stress" Enid Blyton book about adventures in The Faraway Tree, a book I had loved as a child. Now it felt a little dated and sexist (the boy flew the toy airplane, the girl cried) but it still left more of an impression than the Muzak of the phone. One day I stood on the balcony and watched two woodpeckers, black and white with brilliant red crests, pecking industriously at the moringa tree looking for grubs. As they fed each other, I suddenly realised this could be a post on Instagram. I ran inside, grabbed my phone but as I tried to focus, the birds flew off, as if gleefully mocking me. And I understood that moment had just belonged to me and the woodpeckers—a moment unencumbered by filters, hashtags or likes.

I don’t remember what I posted three days ago. But I still remember the woodpeckers clearly. That was not an opportunity lost. Rather it was a moment savoured. And sometimes that is really all we need.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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