Return of locusts

Locusts are back. This time through modern-age aerial channels: television, radio, the Net and high-end phones. Our skies again seem covered by the swarms (not the original ones that eat grain and have been curbed for three decades).

Descending upon our lives obstinately are locusts in a new garb, pillaging the young and ripening crops of our days and nights, destroying all our content (or contentment), and devouring our most precious possession: the wandering mind.

Staccato phone messages, often repeats or cleverly coined ads et cetera, start beeping with sunrise (it seldom stops until one is asleep), and minutes later, radio (FM) and television begin their jarring and lurid blah-blah, compelling irritated listeners and viewers to zap channels with angry fingers.

The day treads ahead with forced listening to calls, most the same, scheme-selling from different numbers and voices, besides sorting a deluge of tweets on iPhone. Some meaningful alerts on mobile phone and well-worked-upon TV programmes do make attempt to make the day a bit purposeful, but.

At home, on road, in office, everywhere, information travels with us like a burgeoning baggage of thoughts (or call it a deluge of infotainment in which we drift). Generally, all one ever sees is sad faces, insipid talk, sneers, leers, anguish: messages incomprehensible to the bearer himself or herself.

At home, the idiot box keep homemakers busy sighing and simpering with the Saas-Bahu characters of TV serials, from forenoon to afternoon, and even the evenings seem to be getting robbed of their beautiful dusky tranquillity.

The bedroom invaders, the television channels (news versions included), in a race to serve more than one can chew, fool self and the viewers alike. Save a few, they all fail to entertain, inform or educate any section of society. If at all they succeed, it is to corrupt public's understanding of issues.

The ever-alive FB and other apps continue to eat up one's time and energy (especially the wandering mind). A thought keeps flashing: what if I could get away from all this cacophony.

As the night darkens, one misses the wandering mind, by then, already eaten up by the locusts that engulfed all the time one had. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre: "If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company."