The real, big problem we must tackle
| Date :03-Nov-2019 |
THIS may be a hundredth time that ‘Loud Thinking’ is being devoted to the problem -- of excessive, maddening, senseless addiction of many people, mostly youngsters, to mobile phones. The gadget is proving to be more dangerous as an addictive material than any other gadget or substance. It has also become a subject of constant conflict in families. The Indian society must not have been confronted with a problem of this seriousness in the last one hundred years. For, countless families are expected to deal with the problem of their youngsters’ addiction to the gadget that anyone can hold in the hand or slip into the pocket or the purse -- and carry it everywhere, anywhere.
Yes, even elders get addicted to the mobile phones. Yes, they also are known to have lost a sense of proportion when it comes to using mobile phones. Yes, the elders, too, are known to have spoilt the atmosphere in their respective families. Yes, men and women also abuse their mobile phones and waste their time and energy and money by hours of wrongful indulgence. Then, why blame only the youngsters? No, we must not blame the youngsters who get addicted to the mobile phones. We must understand them and restrain them from the abuse of the gadget.
Yet, friends, this process is not as easy as it may seem. For, it involves a lot of effort by the families and friends of the youngsters to wean them from the mobile phones’ addiction. A non-user of mobiles -- like me -- may never understand the ways in which the gadget can be used. But I have seen countless youngsters whose sense of proportion has gone for a six, whose sense of self-preservation has gone out of the window, whose sense of respect for the elders who tell them to behave has been burned down by the youth ...! Countless websites dishing out absolutely and unquestionably dirty stuff are available at the click of buttons. Countless websites are available promoting free-sex, promoting gambling, promoting many other activities that do not fit in any moral, cultural, or legal code.
Let us leave alone the elder users of the gadgets and concentrate on the youngsters who get addicted to the mobile phones. Let not miss the dirty reality that countess youngsters are people with no stuff in their brains -- in the sense they do not possess the ability to distinguish between the right and the wrong. Devoid of this sense of balance, they get swept off their feet when they come across something titillating, something that may offer thrill. So, they enter those domains with a sense of thrill and then get lost in the labyrinthine filth. Oppose them and you will meet with a youngster who you do not know even though he or she may be your own child. You are confronted with a stranger whom you have never met or seen. Was this the wonderful little one that I gave birth to? -- you would end up asking.
And tell me friends if this is not the story in countless homes in our society? Is this not the experience which countless people share? Yet, for reasons not easily explicable, most families fail to check their wards’ addictive behaviour -- in terms of mobiles or marijuana or malt whisky or maddening interest in other undesirable things and habits. This may not be the families’ fault, to say the least. But it is the family that suffers the most when a youngster gets trapped in an addiction of criminal propensity. Criminal propensity? Of course, yes.
For, all of know how the people addicted to all sorts of wrong things become thieves in their own homes, stealing money from their elders’ purses and pockets and cupboards. Cops have caught many youngsters as chain-snatchers. Yes. For, every chain snatched, no matter its weight and quality, fetches a youngster at least Rs. 20,000/-. This is good money for a crime that does not take more than just a few minutes every dark evening. The cops, too, don’t know how to sort out this problem. Nor do the parents and the teachers and the sociologists and the psychologists ...! Yet, an answer we must find.