A decade ago, if you had asked me what the national pastime of my country was, I would say movies and cricket without hesitation. Today, a decade later, if you ask me the same question then my decade old answer will no longer be applicable. My answer would be mobile yakking. Yes, jabbering away on mobile seems to be the latest fad. Nowadays, you cannot have a face to face conversation with anybody for more than a couple of minutes. After your two minutes are up, either their mobile rings or they tell you to call them up on their mobile to continue the conversation later. This is what I call the "conversation hang-up". Just the other day I saw 4 people in a car all glued to their cellphones. For all I could guess, they might have been talking to each other using the cellphones out of force of habit. Or they just hated each other with a passion!
I heard somewhere that DWT (Driving while texting) is a traffic offense in Boston. Makes sense. So is talking on mobile while driving illegal in many countries. This is illegal in my country too. But as the saying goes, laws are always made to be broken. There is no exception to this rule. What an irony! this is one rule (the rule to break rules) that never gets broken. How many times have you seen people yakking away to glory while driving, crossing the street, in movie theaters (despite the request to switch off before the show begins), in restrooms and God knows where else! For some, turning off their mobile is like switching off their life-support system. You can see the person fret, fume and in general behaving oddly.
Recently, I was driving in my own lane and in general minding my own business when I had a bitter experience of this mobile yakking phenomenon. As I was taking a very legal right U-turn (after carefully watching the oncoming traffic), out of nowhere, comes a youth on a motorbike (read moron) with a mobile glued to his ear and a missing helmet. The late Evil Canievel couldn't have managed it better. The path of this mobile youth (in every sense) intersected directly with my turning radius. Perfect. Evil Canievel, bless your heart, are you listening? Even you would have thought twice to do such a stunt. This is where my decade and a half long experience in driving took over and I narrowly averted turning this mobile youth into an immobile vegetable. Funny thing was, the guy felt that I had committed a crime by not going over him (on second thoughts, he was closer to the truth than he had imagined). He condemned me to eternal damnation 'cuz I had cut his call short and he had to outmaneuver me to avoid dropping the mobile. Some nerve! I just can't get to understand why it is so important to take a call while driving. For that matter, 99% of the people I know can't do two things at once and they keep telling me so. So why do people actually talk and drive at the same time??!! Does that mean that they're talking gibberish because they are only driving or are they just talking and not driving? Or does our brain switch between driving and talking in an instant as and when required? Either ways it simply does not make sense.
Well, to all those people who feel that today their mobile is more precious than their dear life or driving, try not to let your mothers have the callertune "Tears in Heaven" on their mobiles tomorrow.
I heard somewhere that DWT (Driving while texting) is a traffic offense in Boston. Makes sense. So is talking on mobile while driving illegal in many countries. This is illegal in my country too. But as the saying goes, laws are always made to be broken. There is no exception to this rule. What an irony! this is one rule (the rule to break rules) that never gets broken. How many times have you seen people yakking away to glory while driving, crossing the street, in movie theaters (despite the request to switch off before the show begins), in restrooms and God knows where else! For some, turning off their mobile is like switching off their life-support system. You can see the person fret, fume and in general behaving oddly.
Recently, I was driving in my own lane and in general minding my own business when I had a bitter experience of this mobile yakking phenomenon. As I was taking a very legal right U-turn (after carefully watching the oncoming traffic), out of nowhere, comes a youth on a motorbike (read moron) with a mobile glued to his ear and a missing helmet. The late Evil Canievel couldn't have managed it better. The path of this mobile youth (in every sense) intersected directly with my turning radius. Perfect. Evil Canievel, bless your heart, are you listening? Even you would have thought twice to do such a stunt. This is where my decade and a half long experience in driving took over and I narrowly averted turning this mobile youth into an immobile vegetable. Funny thing was, the guy felt that I had committed a crime by not going over him (on second thoughts, he was closer to the truth than he had imagined). He condemned me to eternal damnation 'cuz I had cut his call short and he had to outmaneuver me to avoid dropping the mobile. Some nerve! I just can't get to understand why it is so important to take a call while driving. For that matter, 99% of the people I know can't do two things at once and they keep telling me so. So why do people actually talk and drive at the same time??!! Does that mean that they're talking gibberish because they are only driving or are they just talking and not driving? Or does our brain switch between driving and talking in an instant as and when required? Either ways it simply does not make sense.
Well, to all those people who feel that today their mobile is more precious than their dear life or driving, try not to let your mothers have the callertune "Tears in Heaven" on their mobiles tomorrow.
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