Sunday, April 20, 2014

A day without the Internet

I got up unsuspecting on a hot Saturday morning in Bangalore. Blurry eyed I groped for my phone and checked my mail. Strange! No new emails in the night! Must be because of the long weekend, I thought naively. I opened Facebook while I was brushing my teeth and hells bells – no new notifications! I sat zonked for a minute till consciousness kicked in. And I checked the time of the last post visible on my facebook wall – 1:00am. There had been no update for the past 8 hours!!

In a moment of sheer brilliance, I checked the network and saw that I’m not connected to the wi-fi. And that’s when I realized that my connection isn’t working. Like a true techi, I fiddled around with the modem, no avail. Finally I gave the service provider a call – we all know THAT doesn’t work – only to find out that some line had been cut last night and they were trying to repair it. And here comes the beauty – the repairs will take 24 HOURS!

So began a day with no internet. To be honest, initially I was stumped. And the super slow 2G on my phone was no relief either. I lolled around on the sofa, flipping channels, but I am not much of a TV person and I soon got bored. And then here is what I ended up doing:
  1. Made breakfast and lunch. And managed to bake a cake. Of course with no internet I couldn’t google recipes, so I had to dig around in my old cookbooks to get to one
  2. Actually made butter at home from all the cream that had collected over months. I have a solid 200gms of homemade buttery deliciousness now
  3. In that process, figured out my new food processor that was waiting a demo. Use the guidebook instead and it worked.
  4. Wrote 800 words on a random topic
  5. Read 100 pages of ‘21st century skills’
  6. Went for a walk
  7. Arranged my wardrobe
  8. Did 2 loads of laundry
  9. Had friends over for some booze and chit chat, and
  10. Finally wrote this blog


Of course all this happened while checking my phone multiple times in the hope that the wi-fi is back. And with some chatting on whatsapp since that was the only thing working. But all in all, it was a very productive day. I would say all of you must try it once – the digital detox. You mull over it, the net is back, blog is posted and I gotta Facebook.

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