Does Anyone Talk

A couple of decades ago, of what I remember, the most cherished moments were families, friends, and cousins getting together on holidays and the entire house would be full of sound of people, warm voices. There would be aunt gossip sessions in one room, teenage cousins giggling away to glory somewhere else and the boisterous kids running all around the house making a mess of everything. Not to forget there was delicious food flowing as if there was nothing else to do. Just eat, talk, play, run around and again the cycle repeats. The usual hush-hush of teens trying to hide something from adults. Everything was pure and light hearted.

So much for the flash back. Now, who talks? Who really has the time to talk? Thanks to the internet, mobile phones, and above all, simple messaging. Everyone seems to be so addicted to the very art of punching in some alphabets on the phone, and clicking that 'send' button, whether the spellings or the language is correct or not, lets not even get into that. No emotions, no connect. Something needs to be conveyed and with just a click of a few buttons apparently everything seems to be said and done. 

Assumption is what most of us live with these days, for instance, if someone sends me a message 'wud u like 2 meet 2day'. My first reaction 'What?? No way!'. But, messaging gives you time to think, you can be fake, you can write what you don't want to. And you can 'pretend'. Now, how genuine the other person is when that message is written is also questionable. Nevertheless, the reply to this absurd message from my side would be 'Sorry, I'm busy' or in a scenario where the language is so pathetic I would probably land up blocking the person to never be able to message me again. Who wants to go through this entire episode once again! Other scenarios are where, like I read somewhere how people break off and even get divorced just over a simple message!

The days when conversations were easy, they were natural, straight from the heart, no pretending, just being the way one is, has been far left behind to the formalities and coldness of messaging and typed words. Somewhere, people are forgetting to be true to themselves and thereby to others. Relationships falling apart, shallow friendships, the human race is simply losing the human touch. As Bruce Springsteen put it in the beautiful song, all we need today is just  'A little bit of that human touch'.