How mobile phones have changed our lives!

I many a times wonder how our lives have changed and how they would be without mobile phones. Along these lines, some things which crossed my mind one afternoon during a convex optimization class:

• When friends decide to meet at some place, say a railway station such as CST at a particular time. These days I find it hard to imagine meeting the friend before making a couple of calls after reaching the place. Before I had a cell phone, how did I manage such things? I can't really seem to recollect!


• About remembering phone numbers of friends, relatives, even our own home number for that matter. A few years back, these used to at the tip of our fingers, now I hardly seem to know any numbers. Is it convenience, or a decreased use of our mental faculties - the very thing which separate us from other creatures?!


• In some cases, it has allowed one to have a more private life, and allows to have private conversations. I am not particularly a fan of this whole privacy thing, and when required, there were ways to do it even in the olden days. Has this ease of maintaining privacy and secrecy, even from the people very close to us helped us, or is it really a harm without us realizing it?


• It is one of the major disturbing factors these days. Many times now it is so good to imagine a world w/o them. Isn't it irritating to find your evening walk companions talking over mobile phones for most of the time and you are left walking along!? I feel sometimes when I do the same, mostly unintentionally, how bad the other people would have felt about it. Are we really that busy to not have time for people who are with us personally at a particular time, and that we have to talk over the phone just then?


• We have started thinking of e-communication as a suitable and "convenient" alternative of personal meetings. Is it even close to personal interactions, in terms of quality? Does all this lead to our distancing from the real world and live our lives more "virtually"?


• In some ways, it has also lead to intrusion of a person's happy life. In present day, I pity my young friends who would be in their primary/secondary school and happily playing cricket on a lazy Sunday morning. I remember exceeding my reported time at home by at least a couple of hours everytime I played this way. These guys would be facing some 4-5 calls from home in the same time, asking them to hurry up. What a shame!


• Imagine yourself walking hand-in-hand with your b/g f and getting those painful calls from home and you having to ditch them or probably lie to the person on the other side of the phone about your whereabouts. Wouldn't you wish you were living in 2002 where you couldn't be contacted so easily?

Some of these may be quite cynical and not really as bad as I have put them/I feel they are. But at times, these modern techno gadgets do put me off and I wish they were never there in the first place.