In an instant, it’s all love & wishes

Shiv Sethi 

THE old order changeth  yielding place to new’, is what Tennyson says in his poem, The Passing of Arthur. He expresses optimism over the fact that change is the law of nature. Indeed, the world we are living in is very different from the world of our forefathers. Ours is a technology-driven age. A complete change seems to have set in the world order. 

With the advent of technology, modern life dons new hues. But in this colourful rainbow, not all shades appeal to our eyes. In the desperate pursuit of a comfortable life, mankind has left many a kindred concept to die their natural death. The worst sufferer amid this entire chaos of technological advancement is the refined emotion of love, which has now assumed a different dimension. 

As we are about to bid adieu to 2017 and ready to roll out a red carpet to 2018, the most wonderful invention of technology — our smartphone — will get flooded with a volley of New Year messages. There will be an unstoppable surge, a deadly deluge of messages with a ceaseless ‘ting tong’ of alert, indicating the mechanical side of human emotions. People from ‘contact lists’ are not selected meticulously for extending wishes. In fact, the fashion in which, with one click, thousands of text messages are sent is akin to an onslaught from  the enemy. 

I nostalgically think of those days, when a few weeks before the New Year, we used to visit bookshops and  Archies galleries to carefully select  greeting cards for our loved ones. The number of cards would barely cross eight or 10, but the intensity of emotions involved in the process of purchasing and sending cards used to be profoundly pleasant. The sensitive selection of lines inside the cards would be a meticulous love-smeared process. And the handwritten words of genuine love inside the cards would sparkle with their unique emotional sheen. 

But much to one’s dismay, now we hardly find anybody enjoying the pleasure of sending cards. Instead, the card-posting custom has given way to Whatsapp, Facebook etc. The genuine loving feelings are absent. 

 This change is also indicative in the romantic world of lovers. Gone are the charming days of writing love letters. Again, courtesy to modern technology, lovers now don’t need to write their feelings on a piece of paper. And with this, the melodrama of love letters (written in blood sometimes!) has also come to a halt. Writing a love letter was nothing short of creating an epic, but delivering it to its destination used to be a crafty skill, executed in a furtive fashion! 

Truly, the emotion of love is everlasting, but the new modes of paying obeisance at the feet of Cupid have taken away much of the mushy joy that came with it.