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. Continue reading →