Count your blessings

Lockdown couldn’t have come at a better time – and we have technology to thank for it

 

I remember India’s victory in the 1983 World Cup like it was yesterday. I didn’t actually watch the final in real time, hearing it unfold on the radio instead. But I still remember every over, every fall of wicket, and of course, Kapil Dev’s magnificence, so many decades down the line.

 

You can imagine my excitement then, when the movie based on those events, 83, was ready for release in the theatres. But before I could make any plans to see it, Omicron began spreading its tentacles all over the country. And, with great reluctance, I had to cancel my plans to see the movie that had captured one of the seminal events of my teenage years. 

 

I was gutted, of course. But I cheered up considerably when I discovered that I wasn’t going to miss out on it for too long. Eight weeks after its theatrical run, 83 would be released on a streaming service. And given that I had waited for nearly four decades to see it, what was another eight weeks?

 

But this entire episode got me thinking. I know that being stuck at home in lockdown-like circumstances is far from ideal. But who can deny that this is the best time in the history of mankind to be isolating within the four walls of your house?

 

And we have technology to thank for that. We can work from home, interact with our colleagues on Zoom, and network via various social media apps. If we want to cook, we can get ingredients delivered to our doorsteps in a matter of minutes. If we don’t feel like cooking, we can order in our favourite foods through various delivery apps. 

 

All that we need is available to us at the click of a button, and we can enjoy the best that the world has to offer from the comfort of our living room couches, as we binge-watch our way through everything the sundry streaming services have to offer. What more could a locked-down person possibly ask for?

 

Don’t believe me. Well, let’s conduct a little experiment. Imagine that Covid had struck not in 2019 but in 2000. How would we have coped with the pandemic in that decade?

 

Working from home would have been a complete impossibility because nobody had high-speed wifi (or any kind of wifi) at home. So, we would have a choice of either shutting down all businesses or keeping them open but risking infection to all workers – not much of a choice, you will agree. 

 

Cooking would have been a challenge because only the basic groceries would have been delivered by your kinara shop. And certainly, you could not have ordered in any cuisine of your choice and had it re-heating in your kitchen in less than an hour. 

 

And what would we have done during those long evenings spent at home? Yes, we had a few DVDs stashed away that could have kept us entertained for a couple of weeks. And we could have watched TV for an hour or so. But there would have been nothing like Netflix, Amazon Prime, or other such streaming services, offering us zillions of shows to feast on. 

 

Looking back on the last two years, I have to admit that lockdown has not been so bad to me. The lack of distractions meant that I could finish my book, Madam Prime Minister, well within deadline. And though its release has come in the midst of Omicron, I have still managed to promote it, conducting TV interviews via Zoom, answering questionnaires via email, and so on.

 

And when I wasn’t writing, I managed to read all the latest books, thank to my Kindle app that stood in for all those shuttered bookshops. I cooked everything my heart (and my husband) desired, getting everything from sausages to sauces delivered to my door. I ordered in from my favourite restaurants, and even though the experience wasn’t quite the same, the food certainly was. And I spent my evenings watching the best TV shows and movies made over the past few decades.

 

Technology may be a mixed blessing. But at this time of global crisis, we have technology to thank for keeping us sane.

 

I spy

Is it ever a good idea to snoop on your children?

It is a scary time to be the parent of teenager. You don’t just have to cope with the ready availability of drinks and drugs, though that is hard enough. With the virtual mainstreaming of porn (available to anyone at the click of a mouse) sex is also a danger zone. Sexting, or sending sexually explicit pictures via phone texts, is rampant among the teenage population. Peer pressure forces kids to become sexual players long before they are ready for sex at an emotional level.  Sexual predators lurk in chat rooms and social media sites to prey on the young and the vulnerable. And the real world is scarcely safer, with reports of rapes and molestations coming in every day.

Combine this with the natural inclination of all kids to turn into monosyllabic creatures of mystery as soon as they hit puberty and you have a huge problem. Just when your children seem to be most vulnerable, their world is closed to you. And the only way to get even a glimpse is (not to put too fine a point on it) by snooping.

The good news is that spying on your kids has never been easier. You can use the GPS on their mobiles to track their whereabouts throughout the day. There are apps that will allow you to monitor their on-line activity – which sites they visited, what software they downloaded, etc – without their being any the wiser. And you can lurk in the corners to check out what they are posting on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram (or get someone else to do the lurking for you).

But just because something is easy, should you do it? And what will you do with the information you glean? There is no way you can use it without admitting that you have been spying. And once you admit that, what will be the repercussions on your relationship with your kids? Will they ever forgive you for invading their privacy? Will they ever trust you again, given that trust goes both ways? What if they rebel against this helicopter parenting and become even more secretive than before? Given their competitive advantage in matters of technology, this is one battle you may never win.

Yet, there is no denying that our children are vulnerable on the Net. Cyber-bullying is rampant, and is sometimes so ferocious that it leads kids to kill themselves. Girls as young as 13 are pressured into sending ‘sexy’ pictures of themselves to their boyfriends; who then circulate them among their friends when the ‘relationship’ ends. And you only have to read reports about the Steubenville rape to see how Instagram, Twitter and other social networks are used to humiliate and shame.

So, when it comes right down to it, would you spy on your teenager? And does it ever turn out well?

Well, the jury is out on that one. I know parents who predicate their relationship with their teenage kids on trust and allow them their space. They respect the boundaries their kids put up and their children respond by being open and sharing their lives with them. But this hands-off attitude doesn’t work for everyone – and may even be downright dangerous for some.

On the other extreme, there are parents who believe that knowledge is power and maintain a constant surveillance on their kids. And while their kids may stay safe as a consequence, their relationship with their children does not exactly flourish. The kids resent the constant interference; and the implication that they are not to be trusted.

So what is a parent to do? It’s a tough one. You can’t really abdicate all responsibility for keeping your kids safe on the grounds that they are entitled to their privacy. On the other hand, you don’t want to be so intrusive that they shut themselves off from you forever. It is a fine line that separates caring from smothering; and parents will find themselves on the wrong side of it one time or another.

But the perils of prying work both ways. In one of my favourite episodes of Modern Family, Claire Dunphy joins Facebook and badgers her two teenage daughters into accepting her friend request in the hope of keeping tabs on their lives. But the tables are turned when an embarrassing photo of Claire – in her wild college days – is posted on Facebook by one of her old friends. It is Claire who is left red-faced as she tries (and fails) to delete the image. 

There is a lesson for us all there. Just as there is some stuff you don’t want your kids to know about you, there is some stuff that your kids don’t want to share with you. It’s all a part of growing up, becoming their own person, inhabiting their own world. And whether it is real life or the virtual world, you have to learn to let go.

That said, I have to admit that spying by parents can teach kids a valuable lesson: that nothing you post on the Internet, no matter how well you monitor your privacy settings, is ever private. Each photo, Facebook post or tweet will live on forever in the ether. The only way to keep things really private is to keep them off the Net. But to delight of spying parents everywhere, that’s one thing Generation Next seems incapable of doing.