Between Masjid, Naqab, and Smartphone: Pigeons Weep, Humans Scroll

In some strange ways, India today is united by a small glowing screen. From the traffic lights of Connaught Place to the fields of rural Bihar, the smartphone has become the great leveller—absorbing attention, dulling outrage, and flattening empathy. As the saying goes, we live in an age that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. In his fortnightly column in The AIDEM titled “Everything Under The Sun,” Nalin Verma moves between mosque politics, veiled women, scrolling villagers, and a grieving pigeon to ask a simple, unsettling question: when everything demands our attention, what—and who—are we quietly learning to ignore?

This is the 23rd article in the column. 

On the sidelines of a book event on December 5 at the Kerala Club in upscale Connaught Place, New Delhi, renowned journalist A.J. Philip recounted spotting a biker scrolling through his mobile phone while waiting for the traffic signal to turn green.

“I sensed that the young man waiting for the red light to turn green was using that brief interval to savour moments with his smartphone,” Philip said, with a concerned smile about the widespread ‘addiction’ to phones among Indians.

Over 1,100 kilometres away, in Daraily Mathia—an extremely remote village tucked in a corner of Purvanchal, in Bihar’s Siwan district near the Uttar Pradesh border—middle-aged villager Krishna Yadav told me on December 15: “The youths keep scrolling through their mobile phones even while relieving themselves behind the bushes in the fields, far from their toilet-less homes; the water-filled lota placed on the ground before them.”

Daraily Mathia and Connaught Place are places in stark contrast. While the former symbolises grinding poverty and rural backwardness, the latter, in the heart of the national capital, embodies modernity in every sense. Daraily Mathia is home to semi-clad, malnourished, and largely barefoot farmers, along with emaciated cows and goats. Connaught Place, by contrast, boasts malls, luxury brands, Cinepolis cinemas, smart vehicles, upscale bars and restaurants—everything that defines modern urban life.

Yet residents of Daraily Mathia and Connaught Place are bound by a shared habit: smartphone use. Staying alert at chaotic traffic signals in New Delhi is as vital for safety as open defecation remains a grim reality in Daraily Mathia, affecting public health and longevity.

“The girls and boys in our families stay busy with their mobile phones in bed before sleeping at night. They get up late in the morning. When the women rise late, meals are not prepared on time. The boys insist on attending online classes as a pretext,” said Krishna, an ex-serviceman now working as a guard in a Sonbhadra coal mine, describing the ‘smartphone mania’ that has gripped the village.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Forebodings

The celebrated historian, philosopher, and writer Yuval Noah Harari—author of the bestsellers Sapiens and Homo Deus—has repeatedly warned of the threats posed to humanity by artificial intelligence (AI), a topic fiercely debated by scholars worldwide. This columnist, with no pretensions to scholarship, is certainly not part of that elite circle discussing Harari’s propositions. Yours truly lacks the academic tools and expertise to fully assess AI’s impact on the present generation.

Yet the observations of Philip and Krishna resonate with my own: as a teacher, I too notice students scrolling through their phones even during classes. What do they gain from these devices? How do they process the information and data flowing from them? What effect do the internet and AI have on their minds? Smartphone use is now universal, from the citizens of Connaught Place to those of Daraily Mathia. But are their responses to the content they consume equally uniform? How long will this ‘mania’ endure? Is it merely a passing phase in human history, or a phenomenon that will forever reshape the patterns of the human mind? 

These questions haunt this writer, who remains, quite honestly, without clear answers.

Of Masjid and Naqab

While travelling in a car with my old school friend Ramesh to meet Vishwaprakash Verma—one of the few surviving teachers who taught us at Dronacharya High School in Done back in the 1970s—I heard Ramesh ask, “Why is another masjid coming up in Babar’s name in Bengal? We are yet to recover from the turmoil caused by the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Why another one in Babar’s name again?”

Ramesh had dropped out of school in Class 8 and now lives the life of a farmer in the village. I changed the subject, as I didn’t find it worthwhile to debate the mosque issue with my friend. 

But back home, Krishna made light of the incident involving Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar pulling the naqab (veil) off a Muslim woman doctor during a job distribution ceremony under the AYUSH scheme in Patna on December 15.

“Nitish is good for us. I got Rs 10,000 in my account just before voting day. My school-going son was pestering me for a mobile phone. I was able to buy it with that money,” said Basanti (name changed), the maid who assists my nonagenarian mother with household chores. Krishna and Israel Mia, a poor farmer, also found it pointless to discuss the naqab incident. 

Five ploughed fields away, in a mango orchard, four youths had chosen quiet corners to focus on their mobile phone screens.

Mother Pigeon’s Trauma

Under the balmy morning sun in my courtyard, before leaving for Done, my mother’s eyes grew distant, almost numb, and her face reflected a deep sense of loss as she recounted the saga of a pigeon couple and their stolen eggs. 

My mother has an old, rugged black button phone—dented and basic—just to answer calls from her sons and grandchildren far away. 

As she narrated, the female pigeon had chosen a quiet corner of our sprawling courtyard—a lush expanse of plants and small trees: neem, guava, tulsi, and others—to lay her eggs. Once laid, she tended them devotedly, sitting on them for hours, keeping them warm beneath her soft feathers. 

Every four or five days, she would briefly leave the nest to join the bulbuls, sparrows, crows, parrots, and other feathered friends pecking at the grains of rice, gram, and wheat that my mother lovingly scattered for them. In her absence, the male pigeon took over, faithfully warming the eggs. Yet the moment his mate returned, he would fly off, relieved of duty.

One morning, while my mother was immersed in her daily reading of the Ramcharitmanas, a young man from the neighbourhood crept in stealthily and stole the eggs. “They were ready to hatch,” she said, her voice trembling. “The baby pigeons were about to emerge and fill their mother’s life with the same boundless joy you brought me when you were born. But that wicked son of Nathuni took them away, leaving the poor mother pigeon in terrible grief. Bhagwan ji will never forgive Nathuni’s son.”

What moved her to share the story that Sunday morning was the piercing cries of the female pigeon echoing from our rooftop. “Every morning, she returns to the empty nest and cries for her lost eggs. Listen—you can hear her wailing,” she said softly as she served me tea. 

She seemed quietly content that I had listened sincerely. The neighbours and villagers hold her in great respect, but they usually brush aside or make light of the story when she tries to tell it. To her, it is a profound sorrow; to them, with smartphones in hand, just a trivial matter of birds.

Back to Delhi

Back in Delhi on December 17, I busied myself checking current affairs to write this column. YouTube and news channels were cacophonously blaring about how Nitish Kumar had violated the honour of a young woman doctor, and how the woman—aghast at the Chief Minister’s conduct—had reportedly decided to give up the job offered by him. 

Supporters and opponents of Nitish were locked in fierce quarrels over the Bihar CM’s alleged immodesty. “It’s a global issue now. People from different parts of the world are shaming and condemning Nitish,” quipped a postgraduate student at our campus in New Delhi. Do these wordy wars on campus carry the seeds of a larger movement? Or would the grip of the small screen on people in general and youth in particular dull these ferocious responses too, and make them yet another ephemeral phenomenon?