No internet. It’s been a while since I’ve had no internet in my daily life. There are times when I want to know something – anything – and I cannot find my answer. I have lost the ability to mark something in my head as needing to be researched. I feel like the questions get lost as soon as I realize my inability to get an instant answer. But are the answers themselves behaving any better? When I have access to all of the information of the internet and I look for that instant information, do I retain it? Is an instant answer memorable? Since being in India, there are so many things that I have been unable to figure out. So much of my surroundings are new, unfamiliar in language only or in idea as well. For example – I went to a tailor to have my lovely Varanasi silks made up into a salwar kameez. The woman I spoke with asked me about chowridar. Uh oh – a new word, a new idea. Is this the local variant of the salwar kameez? A local kind of top? Or something altogether different? If I had easy, transportable access to the internet, I could have looked that up. If I had looked that up, she and I would have had a more sense-able conversation about the garments I wanted made. But stumbling, wondering, finally figuring it out – might I remember better once I know what the chowridar is, because of the very weight of misunderstanding? If there was a deep learning course as in scifi, wherein I popped in contact lenses, put ear buds in, and took a receptor pill…If in a hour, or an hour a day for a week, I could be fluent in Hindi…If I could[…]
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