I was ten years old when I lost Linda, my best friend. She lived in my neighbourhood. One good quality in her was that she never quaralled with me.
Our favourite game was to go up in the air on a swing. It was my father who made the swing and hung it up on a branch of a sprawling tree. We used to meet almost every day in our backyard where the swing was.
One day, however, something unexpected happened. Linda was swinging as high as I could and she went up still higher. The next time when I looked up I saw only the swing and Linda was not on it.
I kept looking for her and found her in a thicket nearby. She had fallen off the swing and fractured her left arm. After the unfortunate incident, we could not meet as usual.
I did not wish to go up on the swing while she was suffering. When I visited her, she was wearing a cast on her broken arm. Her parents had warned her not to play with me or go up on the swing.
It took about one month to heal her broken arm. When she recovered completely, we decided to play with the swing taking turns – one pushing and the other going up in the air. On the swing On holidays, we went higher and higher on the swing.
It was great fun. It was almost dark when Linda’s mother called her to come home without delay to see what her father had brought her. However, we kept on swinging.
Her mother called again and Linda slowly raised her head from the swing as if to hear some woman calling her from miles and miles away. When her mother kept on calling her, Linda said, “Were you calling me, mother? Okay, okay, I’m coming right now.” Linda and I walked to the end of the backyard.
Then she darted even without looking at me. While standing at the front door of her house, she turned back to me and, with a grin, gave me the thumbs-up sign used by pilots everywhere. “All right we can fly tomorrow as usual,” I told myself.
When she did not come to play with me, I knocked on the door almost every day. Instead of Linda, her mother appeared and told me that she was busy and could not come out to play. Then I stopped knocking on the door and tried calling her.
Again her mother said she was too busy to come to the phone. Not knowing how to contact her, I cried. A week later, I heard my mother telling father that he should buy a television to make me happy.
Then I realised that Linda’s father too would have bought a television. I told my father not to bring a television as it has already destroyed my friendship with Linda. “Don’t be silly, when you watch interesting programs you will love them,” father said, brushing aside my objections.
“You’ll love television just like Linda. She is always inside her house glued to the magic box,” mother too joined in. It did not take me a long time to realise that Linda had been totally bewitched by the flickering shapes on the small screen.
After returning from school, she would sit in the living room and watch whatever there was to watch. Children’s programs and cartoons would attract her attention more than anything else. Passive listeners Meanwhile, my father brought a black and white television.
It changed our family life forever. We began to have dinner while watching a popular teledrama. We were not worried about what we ate or the taste of food.
Watching the teledrama took prominence over dinner. In the past, we used to talk a lot while having dinner. Now, television is talking to us and we have become passive listeners.
If I wanted to tell my mother how I scored in mathematics, I had to wait until the commercial. During commercials, we exchanged our views. A string of commercials helped us to talk to each other.
Before my father brought the television, I used to lie in bed at night reading novels or doing my homework. I also listened to the songs on the radio which rocked me to sleep. Now my father goes to bed right after the late night news bulletin.
Mother, however, stayed up to see a late night film. My father has stopped buying newspapers and books. He was an ardent fan of detective stories.
He loved Sherlock Holmes and Perry Mason. After the arrival of the television, we stopped going for film shows and dramas. Father used to say, “Most movies would one day show up on TV.
” He was right. Many award-winning films are shown on television and we can watch them without making any payment. What is more, my father perfected the art of dozing off while watching television.
Sometimes, he appeared to be fast asleep with his eyes tightly shut. However, if you shook him, he would open his eyes and tell us the score and who was batting! It seems to me that television has an enormous influence on our lives. As a child, I did not want to sit still and watch moving pictures on a small screen.
I wanted to ride my bicycle, climb trees, go up on the swing and meet my friends. Today, however, I cannot meet my friends because they are also glued to television. All I know is that I lost my best friend because of television.
Instead of watching what is happening in a 34-inch tinsel world, I would like to stretch out in a real world full of natural beauty. [email protected].
