Chocolate Overthrown, Internet reigns Supreme!

The Internet: such a vast world of endless links and pages. One just has to type a query regarding anything under the Sun: and BOOM!, Google Baba sprays you with a bazillion results in literally, the blink of an eye! Students regard it as a permanent and automatic homework completer, while adults find it a fathomless pit of job opportunities. 

Phones keep buzzing and beeping all the time, to the extent of me going insane! The Whatsapp home screen glares up at you when u wake up and we eager to see the number of likes are Facebook and Instagram profile pictures received. We click the wildest of selfies for no reason at all and forward hundreds of them on all our groups. Wikipedia has evolved into the all-time lifesaving research machine and spending hours in the library, flipping through reference books has become old school. Our beloved Adobe Reader comes to our rescue.

Until a few decades back, we were aware of chocoholics, shopaholics and alcoholics. But as Gen-Y emerges, people are turning into Internetoholics!

 Recently one of my teachers told us, that her daughter conducted a survey in one of the small villages in Uttarakhand for a documentary that she was working on. She asked the children whether they knew what 'Maggi' was. Being one of the most popular food brands in India, Maggi is loved by all, and apparently the children as well. They made slurping sounds signifying that they recognized it. They even knew what 'Nike' was! But when asked about Google, they didn't have a clue to what it meant! I was shocked! How can it be that one half of the world is addicted to the Internet, while the other half doesn't even know what it means!

As a solution to this ignorance, PM Narendra Modi launched the 'Digital India' campaign in 2015. Suggestions of setting up wi-fi units in all villages,  creating wi-fi hotspots on all railway and metro stations and developing 'Smart Cities' were proposed.

Organisations from all over the world pitched in and agreed to contribute their bit to this massive plan. Mark Zuckerberg himself started a chain by changing his profile picture on Facebook as a symbol of support for 'Digital India' which went viral. He even installed a feature where everyone could voice their opinions about #FreeBasics, which in turn would be forwarded to the Indian Department of Telecommunication.Thousand put forward their views.
However, Facebook wanted only a few sites which could be accessed easily without a large consumption of data to be available to the unconnected. It was in favour of differential pricing. The Department decided that to provide just a few sites to some and thousands of others to those who could afford a broadband connection would be downright unfair and would violate the principles of net neutrality. Therefore, it declined this proposal, but is still putting in efforts to make Internet available to all, regardless of caste, place or financial position.
Everybody keeps checking their phones on all occasions for new messages. We certainly find time to chat with our long-lost friends in some distant country over WhatsApp but not to greet our neighbours or say a few words. While the Internet is one of man's greatest assets, it's also one of his worst enemies. The Internet is no doubt, one of the greatest inventions. It provides employment oppurtunities, ways to connect with different people around the globe and offers information on any topic. But it cant replace human connectipns, can it? When we are in hot water and need help, it is our friends, family, dear ones and well-wishers who will rush to our aid, not the Internet whom we hold so dear. We have lost our social bondings and in turn have been glued to social networking sites. It's time to chuck aside the Internet and our phones for a few days and prove that we are social animals, not people bound by the Internet.