Thursday, October 21, 2004
TV de-addiction
This one is straight out of Ripley's Believe It Or Not.
"Sujith RK of Bangalore (India) wilfully and of his own accord, pulled out the cable connection to his TV, paid the cable guys their money every month and abstained from watching TV for a whole of 3 months from July to October in the year 2004"
The main reason for such a drastic step was the amount of ads that deluge us every single day on TV. You cannot watch anything with any kind of seriousness or concentration before being abruptly (emphasis on that, damn it!) jolted by a "message". I absolutely hate having my life disrupted in this fashion. In fact, I make it a point to not pick up the mobile over weekends just on this whim. Of course, not all of my friends see eye-to-eye with me on this particular point :)
I agree with them in principle but hey, whimsical fancies are rather illogical.
You won't believe the amount of free time I had once the idiot box was out of the equation. It's not as if I did not watch any movies in the meantime. I did and quite often too. In spite of that, I saved over 2 hours per day by not entertaining any commercials of any sort. The second major discovery was that the sofa in my house COULD face other walls and still function just as well. In fact, a major, more practical rearrangement of the furniture was possible just by acknowledging that the TV is NOT going to be turned on. I had time to read, to listen to music, to study, to read the newspaper thoroughly, to THINK. Oooh, save the brickbats on that one :)
Finally, in a moment of weakness, I did plug in the damned thing back and have been glued in ever since. I cringe everytime a movie breaks for ads and sorrowfully long for the delicious days when I was a free man. Will I ever have the will power to do it a second time? I do not know.
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"Sujith RK of Bangalore (India) wilfully and of his own accord, pulled out the cable connection to his TV, paid the cable guys their money every month and abstained from watching TV for a whole of 3 months from July to October in the year 2004"
The main reason for such a drastic step was the amount of ads that deluge us every single day on TV. You cannot watch anything with any kind of seriousness or concentration before being abruptly (emphasis on that, damn it!) jolted by a "message". I absolutely hate having my life disrupted in this fashion. In fact, I make it a point to not pick up the mobile over weekends just on this whim. Of course, not all of my friends see eye-to-eye with me on this particular point :)
I agree with them in principle but hey, whimsical fancies are rather illogical.
You won't believe the amount of free time I had once the idiot box was out of the equation. It's not as if I did not watch any movies in the meantime. I did and quite often too. In spite of that, I saved over 2 hours per day by not entertaining any commercials of any sort. The second major discovery was that the sofa in my house COULD face other walls and still function just as well. In fact, a major, more practical rearrangement of the furniture was possible just by acknowledging that the TV is NOT going to be turned on. I had time to read, to listen to music, to study, to read the newspaper thoroughly, to THINK. Oooh, save the brickbats on that one :)
Finally, in a moment of weakness, I did plug in the damned thing back and have been glued in ever since. I cringe everytime a movie breaks for ads and sorrowfully long for the delicious days when I was a free man. Will I ever have the will power to do it a second time? I do not know.
Labels: Thoughts...
