Can we eat without the TV anymore? Exercise without AirPods? In fact, can we do anything without the phone nearby?
Typically, our justification is something like, “What if someone calls, needing an urgent spare kidney?”
Yeah, right! We probably have better odds surviving Russian Roulette than this killer—the dreaded enemy #1: multi-tasking!
Can we imagine a world without a smartphone? The other day I went to a roadside cobbler in Luz Corner, Chennai. He lived on the street under a so-called cardboard box no bigger than 2 ft × 2 ft. He repaired my slippers but didn’t have change for my crisp ₹100 note. He looked at the note up and down for two minutes. It felt like he hadn’t seen anything like this in a long time. I felt pity for the poor guy.
Then he looked up and said, “Sir, please G-Pay. Here’s my QR code.”
As he was fixing my footwear, he was watching the TV serial Lakshmi on his phone, because he simply cannot miss the 2 pm episode under any circumstance. Suddenly everyone is Rain Man and every show is People’s Court! The net-net: I walk back home with two left slippers. The guy had promptly stitched the toe ring on the other side, being upset with Lakshmi’s sinister sister-in-law, who had been trying to poison her in slow motion for the past three weeks!
No one should be surprised by such things in the world, but alas, satsang and temples are not immune either—because, after all, people are people. Our beloved Guru Maharaj would say, “Only dirty clothes come to the laundromat!” So we bring our bad habits right into the satsang, where doing anything without multi-tasking seems impossible.
That very thing we intend to gain—the one-pointedness, the focus on Bhagavan or Guru—seems to be the very thing directly targeted by the never-ending desire to multi-task: the urge to take pictures and videos, open up lyrics, and so on.
Even without the phone, habitual multi-tasking makes us unable to perform a spiritual activity without a much-needed distraction. Scroll through messages (even forwarded ones) while chanting nama. ‘Work-remotely’ while attending satsang. Can we attend scripture-learning classes without cooking or cleaning in parallel? Somehow some multi-tasks are justified in our heads, and we lose the very point of the effort in the first place—to gain one-pointed bhakti.
So our compassionate Guru Maharaj encourages us to chant nama and walk. It’s no problem, he says. ‘You burn sins and cholesterol at the same time!’ This is precisely why we like our Guru. He looks only at the positives and takes those alone from an ocean of negatives.
But can we really feel justified like this?
Sriram Ramanujam, Houston TX
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