"Hello... Its raining.. "

It was the kind of day when people knew it would rain but did not exactly know when. Typical monsoon day in Hyderabad. Two minutes into my ride that day, it started pouring and I had to stop and find a shelter lest I find myself swimming in the Hyderabad waterways :) And so I did. It was an abandoned shop with a small extended roof overlooking the busy roads, good enough to give cover to four random people like me who had dared the rain gods and lost!

In a different world, it would have been an opportunity to strike up random conversations with these four strangers. And like any such conversations one would imagine, we would have started with Cricket - the universal subject. All four would have enough accolades for the Indian team. Then we would move on to Politics - the Universal language that everyone understands and has opinions about, and probably next about the unique feature of the city - how it can turn into an ocean when it rains. It probably was designed that way to make up for the lack of an ocean in the near vicinity. And at the end of it all, we might even have realized one was a distant cousin of the other etc. Happens sometimes ;-)

Yes, all of that would have happened, but in a different world. In today's world that isn't the case. All the other three quickly reached out to their mobile phones and started conversations with people they already know while I stood staring at the overflowing waters, knowing well that if I called somebody on a Saturday afternoon all I would get is a good amount of bashing! In a while the rain subsided, and everyone went their ways entrusting their bikes with the additional job of swimming. Obviously, the distant cousin will never be found.

May be I am generalizing this all too much to say that while mobile phones have brought distant people closer, it also made people around you distant. There is some truth to it though. One can always spot people fiddling with their mobiles when in new environments rather than looking around or talking to somebody. Our contacts have become our world. So it seems.