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08:20 PM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
July 21, 2013
I was sort of riffling through my files of cuttings and came across a column I used to write called “Straight from the heart.” These days it sounded so trite and schmaltzy, almost corny. Who would write a column with that name, like a bad Mills and Boone novel? Perhaps because we have lost the ability to speak from the heart or act from it the title sounds odd.
We are electronic folks now, made of ticky tacky and, like the houses in Chandigarh or London’s row houses, we are all just the same, highly interchangeable, our personalities lost or smothered by the tsunami of technology that has washed out all originality, all our private traits, everything that made our character distinctive. Now, we speak like echoes of each other, have exactly the same aspirations and seem to be made of plastic when it comes to interacting with each other. Robots clanking our way through the social order.
Just going through the steps, gut wrenchingly predictable, mouthing the same meaningless sweet nothings, not really caring, seldom hearing, largely interrupting, looking to celebrate the failures of our fellow friends rather than celebrate their triumphs, our thoughts and our plans predicated more to greed than grandeur.
We all have hearts for sure but maybe like with Miranda in Notre Dame we use it for nothing more than the pumping and circulation of blood. No time for anything else nor the inclination.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
If my call is so important to them, why don’t they answer it for 22 minutes?
How come when I want to, but something specific online is the only item out of stock.
When I get into a queue or lane going fast, the moment I get in, it becomes the slowest and refuses to budge.
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