Say, if you actually came to me and asked me to look down on my lockdown routine, I’ll pretty much have a heavy list. Yes, I did a million things during the lockdown – watch series, attend my JEE preparation’s zoom classes, okay watch series again, scroll through Instagram feeds, sending a snap of every curtain of every room and the disdain version of cakes and cookies I made, grooving to Badshah’s autotune music, trying virtual Zumba sessions and oh gosh the list goes endless but my sentence can’t. So, I’ll stop! So, now that I’ve answered to your question. It’s my turn right, what if I ask you to find a linking trail in all of these what would it be? Though of it – Technology! 

This ubiquitous buzzing discussion of technology eating over a major share of our life and time has been here for a while. No one can deny it. But as every matter in this world has that one hard-hitting moment where we actually tend to feel the intensity of it like never before, lockdown gave us this millennial revelation that one can’t just survive without water, oxygen and gossip but also technology. If you’re going to ask me “So, what?” then hold on for a moment. Just think about it what if I tell you that you won’t have Internet for a week

(Okay, that would be too stone-hearted of me to even think that way), so let’s just have it for a day. No internet, No mobile phones, no Echo Dots and Siri, no Netflix or Prime, No Reddit…..sounds like no life right? That’s exactly how much significant it is. Technology is vital for our survival and yes inevitably it was and if I may say it is still a lockdown routine for most of us.

Consider previous to the era of BC (Before Covid, I mean) we couldn’t so easily get away with our parents on excessive usage of gadgets especially phones. And what I mean excessive is according to my parents’ standards anything more than a few minutes or seconds. Whatever let’s not get to that.  Indian Parents have this exemplary notion that anything that goes wrong with me has something connected to me using my phone. Anything like literally anything I mean it. Say, even if my hand aches due to my brother banging against me, it’s my mobile that’s accused guilty not my brother. Like, even when we genuinely spent our times googling notes or watching YouTube on how to cover the entire syllabus in a month or similar kind of educational videos, our moms would straight away walk to us on our faces and give that strange look into my eyes; a stare that gives us a thousand thoughts running in our mind on how to explain to her the fact that for this One time we were using the OnePlus tool for something useful only. 

But after Covid making its appearance amongst a lot of changes that happened, the underlying to fact to everything was that we were caged. We couldn’t go out for anything. So eventually, even our parents’ jobs were running over their laptops. So, that’s Probably why because they were dependent on ‘Hathway’ Fibernet for their work, didn’t have a ‘way’ to question us over us using gadgets anymore. And we had our reasons too. All the time when Airtel would telecast their advertisements as ‘Stay connected with the world with us’, it never made much sense to me. But at the lockdown I felt that for real. Only through my blue-light screens I knew of anything that happened beyond my flats and in the outer world. I’d never in my wildest dreams ever imagined that I would have to FaceTime to my neighborhood flat mate to check on her as if she was in Florida miles away. Whether I constantly opened and closed Instagram to check on the memes about the perks of lockdown or about trying to do the new ‘this is the real me, no filter’ Tik Tok challenge (Don’t gang up on me now! Tik Tok was there for the first three months of lockdown and what difference after that, we’ve Instagram reels) or even simply about how everybody tweeted about selfcare and self-love and however cringe that was, it was needed. I couldn’t have survived without it. I kind of now understand why Money Heist became a famous series only during the lockdown even though it was released two years ago. It’s probably because when the professor was smartly planning how to get his heist hunt members out of the Royal Mint or the Bank of Spain (in whichever season you’re in), we were desperately searching for solutions on how to get out of the terrible lockdown. Maybe!

Let’s talk about online classes. The most important topic. Although, when the government said venture out only for essential things and it shut down schools, firstly I thought ‘Oh, so maybe schools aren’t essential’ and I felt I was right all along but then whether its right or wrong one has to deal with it. So here we go, the virtual alternative. In the same screens where we were blissfully streaming

‘Never have I ever’ over Netflix, we then had to accept to see our classmates and teachers in small squared Zoom icons. At the beginning, I felt I will miss the chaos of the classroom environment and that online classes would definitely be a failure as compared to the physical sessions. And guess what, I was right here too but in a wrong manner. Online classes were a failure but what I got it wrong was the chaos wasn’t missing. We got loads of it. People unmute at the wrong times and I get to hear my friend’s mom scolding her for having her coffee without brushing her teeth, another one leaving the camera turned on and ghosting away to eat while his little brother shows up with his diapers. However virtual these classes were, the situations were real. We were all succumbed to this and there seemed no way out. Bit by bit, we started accepting the reality (Wait, is that why they call it virtual reality, I don’t know). We started learning and those doubt-clarifying Google Meets helped us a little too. From exams becoming a less of a stress to incomplete assignments getting a new excuse of Internet problems, technology has been very kind to me and I am solemnly, sincerely and all ‘insert some nice word’ly grateful for it.

Life became a bit of a contrast. Sometimes I’d be cursing Mathematics to leave its x and finally move on because it’s solution couldn’t even be found on Brainly while on the contrary YouTube has five – minute hacks and solutions to all of my life problems from tying my shoelace to preparing Italian recipes in a tiny Indian Kitchen with only spices and more spices. That brings me to the topic of cooking or more of baking. Everyone started baking and posting pictures of cakes and that went overboard to the extent that the app of Big Bazaar’s Big deal of the day started having exclusive offers for Butter and Icing Sugars. I suddenly felt that I was doing it too much and that sooner I might be at the hospital not for Covid but for diabetes.

But seriously speaking, our lives inside our homes were monotonous. And they still are as a fact considering the new lockdown imposed. And technology brought that flippant change and a bit of spice to break that monotony otherwise we would have been rotten in hell. No matter how much I loved my family time, my mother oiling my hair and applying all the possible kitchen products over my face, my father talking about his good old college days and wanting me to go to college even more soon and solving every newspaper Crosswords with him , my little siblings asking me the silliest of the silly questions on why Peppa Pig stills gets to go on a vacation in the cartoon series while they have to be inside their flats and all the sweet lockdown advantages, I couldn’t have done it without the major part of Technology.  Trust me, not without the Home Theatre Stereo installed after the actual theatres shut down, not without the Ovens that baked all of my cakes and cookies although a disaster, not without the Zomato app that got my favorite fish-fingers delivered all the way from Buhari to Velachery, not without Hotstar’s  ‘Telugu-dubbed-but-still’ Tamil movies, not without Kindle that gave me a sneak peek of The White house lifestyle by letting me read ‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama, not without my Fitbit device that actually told me I had my legs working too and I have to walk everyday, not without any of these would I have survived. I made it alive till here that am writing all of these. 

And as one of the million wellness podcasts I watched during lockdown said that ‘Gratefulness is the greatest gift one can ever give’. So here I am thanking the technology for getting me out of one of the toughest phases of life. Thanks a lot. And if technology were to ask me “Oh, really” in return, I’ll say if it’s okay of me being in my pajamas all day long as how I was during my entire lockdown then yes, I’d be even ready to say an ‘I do’ to you! You get it, if you get it!

Written By,

NAVINA G A 20BIS028

WINNER (TECH) – SCRAWL A BLOG