A usual day in States starts out with me waking up to the ear-drillingly loud alarm on my Samsung Galaxy, checking my email and Facebook, surfing the web and reading the news. Then I soullessly get out of bed and proceed to breakfast, during which I also constantly fidget with my phone, jotting down everything I need to do for that day and texting my friends, usually to vent about how tired we are and who has gotten less sleep. Then in class, I take notes on my laptop as I constantly browse through my email and simultaneously type things I don’t understand into the Google search bar. As soon as I get out of class, I go back to staring at my phone, browsing through Instagram and Facebook, walking to my next class or lunch. (I have once literally run into a door because I had my head in my phone and didn’t see the door at all.) Bottom line, I am always connected, always online, and always ready to access everything on the Web. A ridiculous amount of my life is consumed by my phone and my laptop.

However, on my second day in India, I went on a houseboat—my fellow intern Jake has written about it a few posts back—and it did not have Wifi! I felt disconnected and nervous. I cannot even remember the last time I didn’t have access to Internet or my phone. After a couple of hours, I simply didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t even have music to listen to since I always stream it from Spotify or Youtube. In hopelessness, I lay down on the cushioned sun deck, hoping to take a nap, which would kill some time. So I sat there, directionlessly looking into the backwaters, the rice farms, and the tiny villages clustered up in the narrow grounds next to the river. I watched little naked boys taking a bath in the river and running away in embarrassment as they saw me staring at them on the boat. I also watched the birds hover right on top of the river surface, meticulously and gracefully snatch the fish out of the water, and fly away gobbling it down. I watched the sun slowly setting, painting the whole sky orange and pink with its radiance.

Before I knew it, it was pitch black outside and we were called down for dinner. The few hours sitting on the boat had gone by pretty quickly, and I realized I wasn’t as bored or nervous about not having Internet anymore. There was something to see, something to keep me entertained in the backwaters; in short, so much life that revolves outside of my tiny Galaxy S4 screen.

Here in Thekkadi,  I wake up to the blindingly bright sunlight beaming through my window in my room at a farmhouse. After I wash up and get dressed for the day, I walk outside and pass by the chickens and geese peeping. I just stare at them for a brief moment every time walk by, because for some reason, it is so amusing to watch them pecking and digging the ground. Then I go up to the roof of the restaurant to watch a troop of monkeys chasing each other and staring me down, curious to see if I will feed them food—which I was told not to do since it isn’t healthy for them. I talk to a couple of guests and staff about their day as I go for my morning cereal. After breakfast, I finally take a seat at Cinnabar and open my laptop for the first time. I still am more used to and prefer to have 24/7 access to the Web, but a week in India has thus far made me realized what a slave I am to modern day technology and how I may have been missing out on things happening outside of my computer and cellphone screen. Disconnecting really isn’t so bad after all!