Is your S4 smart enough to cook you curry?

How many times do you see a family sitting to dinner with no one actually speaking to each other? They are all busy surfing the net, catching up on the sports scores or poring over the stock market indices, interrupted only by the occasional need to reach out for the chopsticks to pick at the buttered prawns.

What have we gotten ourselves into?

We now find ourselves so tied up with the virtual world that everything we need now appears accessible through one of the many smart devices now that is readily available from the corner electronic equipment store.

Apparently, I am not the only person worried about this state of affairs. The pastor of the church I went to attend a service went so far to remark that; “The web doesn’t cook curry, but your mother can...”. That was Reverend Father Michael who delivered the sermon during mass which I attended at St Peter’s Church in Malacca last Sunday. Everywhere you go, you see practically everybody speaking into their handphones. Otherwise, they’d be texting, youtubing, facebooking or playing games on their smart devices.

Some of my friends have resorted to imposing a “no handphones” rule when sitting down to dinner. The first person who dares answer the phone when it rings, does so on pain of being made to pay the bill at the end of the meal.

It’s hard to connect with people the ‘human’ way nowadays, as everyone is so engrossed with their smart devices. I have caught friends sitting side by side but still communicating with each other through their mobile phones. Apparently, using special emoticons enables them to show their feelings much more easily than confronting each other face to face.