Blackberry saga reminds us that we are not robots

The Blackberry internet outage came and is now history. The silly jokes at the expense of the hapless Blackberry users have circulated at viral speed worldwide and they have also subsided. People's blood pressures have sky rocketed and normalised again. At the end of it all, one stark question still stands glaringly, awaiting an answer. How were we able to survive before our smartphones, tablets and notebooks?

One is reminded through this Blackberry Saga, of the panic attack that was triggerd by the fear of known as the Y2K millenium bug. It gripped humanity on the eve of the 1st of January 2000. All awaited with bated breath, hoping against all hope that the ushering in of a new century would not lead to a global crash of computer systems. This week's Blackberry debacle has proved once again that man is now a slave of technology. Who can bravely stand up and claim that he is master of technology and is not at its absolute mercy? No siree, few can honestly make such a proclamation. What we need to do now and again is take breaks from Skype, Gtalk, Twitter, Blackberry Messenger, Facebook, Whatsapp and the host of other applications that we use to get in touch. Let us make a deliberate effort to communicate via a good, old fashioned sms or to make a normal telephone call. Let us park our cars and walk to the shops and let us handwash our laundry now and then. Switch off your computers and TV sets once in a while. Why do all of this?

The reason is simple: to remind ourselves that life is not a Science fiction flick in which we rely on some gadget, program or application to live. We need to remind ourselves that we invented this technology, it did not invent us. We are not robots, we are human! If Hagar the horrible, Tarzan, Asterix and Fred Flintstone could survive in the olden days with the most primitive and bare necessities, there is no logical reason why we cannot. Think about it, should we not go back to the basics?