Subir Roy: Reaching out to friends

OFFBEAT

When our daughter's "twelfth boards" were over my wife and I were prepared for her to enjoy her last long bout of leisure before beginning college. But what really surprised us was the glimpse we had of the emerging lifestyle of the eighteen-plus. When they have lots of time, they do not talk to each other in the analogue mode but prefer to digitally chat on the Internet.

This goes on for hours and hours. In her pre-eighteen antediluvian incarnation, in the run up to her exams, she would talk to her friends on the phone the old-fashioned way to discuss knotty problems in maths or political science. But now when she really wanted to communicate with soul mates with all the time at hand, it had to be the digital way.

Until not so long ago, our children being too long on the net would send alarm bells ringing. Do you realise how much it is costing us (in terms of the phone bill), my wife or I would ask. That was the age of the dial-up connection. Now we were in a different age "" that of an uninterrupted broad-band connection that cost a fixed amount unless you kept accessing an astronomical number of pages.

Of course, there has to be a phone connection and the instrument right next to the computer. The broad-band people had thoughtfully provided it free as a DSL link package, definitely with the social needs of today's eighteen-plus in mind. The phone is a kind of service overlay, to communicate cryptic message to establish or keep going the main mode of communication "" Internet chat.

In between chatting on the Net you need to go and sleep and today's eighteen-plus indeed do that. But during that time, too, maybe when you are just dozing off or when you get a blinding insight in a dream, there is always something cryptic and urgent to communicate. So it is that my wife and I have found that when we thought our daughter was asleep, she was actually furiously and, it seems, almost compulsively messaging her friends on her cellphone.

Having had a good upbringing she is mindful of not running up a huge cellphone bill, so it is just messaging. But it is messaging until you drop off to sleep and a few times till you finally get up, to wash up and then start chatting on the Net.

After a few days I decided to talk to our daughter, not so much to reprimand her for being endlessly on the Internet but to find out what makes today's youngsters click. What on earth do you discuss for such long hours, I asked. Her body language said she was embarking on the tough task of bringing up papa. But I don't chat all the time, she replied.

Then what do you do, I asked, with increasing puzzlement. I read a novel or two, she said. I was foxed. But isn't it painful to spend long hours hunched up before a screen, I argued. Her exasperated reply was, "That's why I asked you to present me with a beanbag for my birthday." True enough, there she was reclining partly on the beanbag, the keyboard on her lap and reading!

By now I was also exasperated and tried a final gambit. Why don't you read a novel that comes between covers; and in any case, isn't it bad for your eyes to stare at a screen for so long? The expression on her face said she was delivering the final put down. Baba, she said, don't you spend all your office hours before a screen, and reading books on the Net costs nothing. Who can argue with a youngster who is so conscious about saving her parents' money!