Kaisar Ahmad Malla
For a day without screens, I realized how much I had been missing the world right beside me.
I had just returned from a long night duty at the hospital, exhausted and drained. After lunch, I lay down for a short nap, hoping to recharge my body and mind. When I woke up, I reached for my phone, as I always do, only to find that the network bars had vanished. At first, I thought it was my phone acting up. I ejected the SIM card, cleaned it, slid it back in and waited with hope. But the phone stubbornly refused to catch a signal.
Just then, a family member walked in and quietly said, “There is a network blackout.”A chill ran through me. Only hours earlier, I had scrolled through news about floods in Jammu. Now, I was hearing whispers that the floods had also crippled communication lines. The memories of the devastating 2014 floods, when Kashmir was cut off from the world, flashed before me. It took me a little while to accept that this was not a problem with my phone, it was a collective silence forced upon an entire region.
Across the Valley, people were restless, some even in panic. The shutdown lasted barely 24 hours, yet it felt like an eternity. Phones were checked and rechecked, Wi-Fi routers turned off and on, devices restarted endlessly, as if pressing the restart button could magically bring back the invisible lifeline we all cling to. This short blackout revealed something larger than the floodwaters. It showed us our own fragility. I myself felt uneasy, unsettled, as though a part of me had been unplugged. And in that uneasiness lay a painful truth, “we have become prisoners of our screens”.
There was a time when a rainy day in Kashmir meant gathering in living rooms, telling stories, sipping tea or playing carrom with friends. Now, even during a storm, most of us sit alone in silence, scrolling endlessly, locked into glowing rectangles. We have lost the warmth of social gatherings, the joy of outdoor games and the simple beauty of face-to-face conversations. Children no longer run in the streets, laughter does not echo in the courtyards and even families living under the same roof speak less to each other because our eyes are glued to devices, not to the people sitting beside us.
The truth is, social gatherings are more than just entertainment. They are healing. They are where frustrations dissolve in laughter, where burdens are shared in stories and where bonds are stitched tighter with every handshake, smile and conversation. Yet, today, those moments have been replaced by lifeless emojis and forwarded messages. And this is why the 24-hour silence felt heavier than the rains, it reminded us of what we have been missing in real life.
That day, as the network failed, I realized how much I too had become dependent, surfing news, checking updates, refreshing feeds. And when all of it suddenly disappeared, I felt a strange emptiness. But in that emptiness, I also found a lesson. The silence taught me that human connection should not depend on towers and signals. It reminded me that while technology connects us to the world, it has also quietly disconnected us from the people sitting right beside us.
The 24-hour blackout was not just a disruption, it was a mirror. A mirror showing how fragile our lives have become in the absence of the internet and how urgently we need to reclaim the lost art of simply being together, offline. Because when networks fail, what must never fail is our humanity, our conversations and our bonds with one another. And perhaps, the next time rains flood our streets, instead of waiting anxiously for the signal bars to return, we should walk to our neighbors, sit with our families and bring back the lost warmth of togetherness, because no screen in the world can replace the comfort of a human voice, a shared smile or a hand on your shoulder.
(The author is a health worker and can be reached at [email protected])
