The audio-visual media is so easy entertaining and engrossing

 The audio-visual media is so easy entertaining and engrossing

I am all focussed and doing some serious work on the laptop.
The phone goes beep, beep, beep with notifications.
I turn the phone screen upside down to avoid distraction.
But I cannot hold the attention for long on the work I am doing as the notifications beep is going on and on.
So, I decide to take a quick 2-minute break from work drink some water check notifications, if anything important reply back and then get back to work.
I open the water bottle take a sip while unlocking the phone.
First, I check mail , find nothing important there then I go to WhatsApp, there are 600 messages in school friends’ group, luckily my school friends change the title of the group to suit the occasion. If it is a friend’s birthday then the group for that day is named after the birthday boy or girl which makes it easier for me to remember to send birthday greetings. I would hate myself if I miss greeting someone on their birthday. I take few seconds, frame a heartfelt message and send it after that I scroll up to read the 600 messages carefully avoiding the lengthy videos on how big a cheater modi is or how stupid a person Rahul Gandhi is, I also never open the sunrise picture with good morning wishes, a baby Krishna in the background and a hindi shayari on the foreground, or a smiling tea kettle or any motivational self-contradictory hypocritical message. I go to the 3 astrology groups where big minds are at work. They dissect one birth chart to the minutest possibility 70 years down the lane. If I have to read every message in the group, 24 hours a day will be less, so I just exit whatsapp out of the frustration of not contributing anything to the group.
From there I move on to Facebook, check notifications of which 50% of them are requests to like their fb pages! which I do if I find the person, page or the message relevant to my current status. As I scroll down the Facebook page all I see is videos, 5-minute crafts, street food, motivational videos, comedy videos, hebbers kitchen this that, then there are advertisements to sell straighteners, hair gels, pimple removers , air tickets then spiritual videos on how a dumb and deaf girl got cured within 2 seconds, and then a swami saying chemistry + physics + maths = arnab goswami….
I open the phone for a quick 5-minute break to check notifications and here I spent 1 hour just surfing WhatsApp and Facebook, and I repeat this cycle 6 times in a day.
At the end of the day I crib about wasting another day, for making it the most unproductive day. so instead of winding up the day on time I end up working extra time and rush through the work invariably every day at the slog hours.
If Facebook and WhatsApp were not enough, we now have Netflix and amazon and their goddamn addictive series. I once binge watched all the episodes of “the test case “on alt Balaji, I dd the same with a series on osho called wild life county on Netflix,
To watch the osho series uninterrupted I faked illness to my children husband and colleagues in office , stayed home the entire day and watched it in a go! I did the same with a series on netaji Subhash Bose on alt balaji . I got so addicted to house of cards on Netflix that I started hallucinating about the underwood’s, Douglas stamper, heather Dunbar, Seth Grayson, Remy Danton and white house. . My daughter suggested to the husband to send me to rehab for deaddiction. After some counselling by family and friends I am sober these days.
I don’t remember the last time I could hold my attention on to a book, Or least complete reading a book from 1st page to the last page without skipping pages or moving on to the next book leaving this midway.
If I am a little normal person today it is all thanks to me for not being an active person on Instagram, but whenever I open it I peep into the personal lives of celebrities for endless hours and I waste another week wondering how they maintain clean homes, perfect bodies, smiling faces and rich paying jobs by continuously manipulating , exploiting every person they meet.
The audio-visual media is so easy entertaining and engrossing that anything which requires serious focus and undivided attention is becoming a big turn off. Call it a boon or a bane but this is what it is!