POEME: I, Me, My Phone

I, Me, My Phone

They come home.
But they don't come home.

They see you.
But they don't see you.

They smile at you.
But they don't smile at you.

They are on their devices.
They are on your devices.
They are with people they do not know,
do not want to know.
But they do not want to be
with people they know,
who anyway, they do not really know
nor really want to know.
They are busy with things
they think matter.
But they ignore things
that do matter.

They are your sons and daughters.
Nephews and nieces, siblings and cousins, friends and colleagues.
Husbands and wives.
They are your co-travellers in life;
on short and long haul journeys.

Soon they will be your parents.

They ignore you.
They ignore the real world around them.
They ignore themselves.

You do the same.

They, you, I.
We have all, always lived in a reality
which we were never really sure
was real.  But now, we live in one
that we know for sure is not real.
The unreality,
or is it, the disreality
of Internet and e-mails,
social media and online games,
movies and serials.

Our loves
are now on-hand electronically,
but distant physically and emotionally.
Soon we will be making love,
not to real people, but to these
disreal toys, manufactured comforts and artificial intelligences.

The orchestra of the Homo sapiens
has reached its crescendo.
The power of the homo
has far outstripped his much vaunted wisdom.
This ape's masterful control of the world outside
is matched only by its utter ignorance
of what lies inside itself.

Our inability to know the Absolute Reality
has always pushed us into rejecting
the Objective Reality
and embracing the Subjective
and Intersubjective Realities.
We are now into new
Subjective and Intersubjective realities:
those owned and managed by corporations.
Empires, religions and social institutions
are losing hold.  Or rather,
newer paradigms of empires, religions and institutions
are taking hold: physical coercion,
guilt and shame
are giving way to canny subterfuge,
psychological manipulation
and unscrupulous marketing.

We are entering a brave new world.
Brave?  More like dastardly.

We fool.
We are fooled.
We are fooled by ourselves.

Nothing new about that, anyway.  We have always done that.

All species fool others
in some or the other way - other species,
as well as other individuals of their own species.
Not just humans do it.
Not just animals do it.
Not just insects do it.
Even plants fool others - and not just sundews and flytraps and pitcher plants.
Even the lovely orchids do it!

But we are unique.
I am unique.
I fool not just other species, or other men,
but myself too.
I live on all kinds of fanciful stories.
And all these devices allow me
to make ever greater, ever more fanciful
stories about myself.
I pretend to other men, known and unknown.
I pretend to the world.
I pretend to myself.

Every Gangu Teli today is Raja Bhoj.*
Every gadhayya today is Rani Kamlapati.**

Technology
and AI
are already making most humans irrelevant.
With a vast majority of upcoming adults
actively working towards making themselves irrelevant,
where will the world end up?
A dystopian nightmare
of some almighty corporation deciding that the world,
or rather its balance-sheet,
is better off with half the low-paying game-playing humans
killing themselves?

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* An old saying of Bhopal - 'Kahan Raja Bhoj, kahan Gangu Teli' - highlighting the fact that the alpha in any society is always singular, and one does a disservice to oneself if he fancies himself to be the alpha when he is not.  He should rather get on with what he really is, and really can do; not get all fanciful and lose even that which he does have.

** An old saying of Bhopal - 'Taalon mein Bhopal Taal, Baqi sab talayyan; Rani to Kamlapati, baqi sab gadhayyan' - highlighting the same message above, with female protagonists in place of male ones, above.

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