The Day the Internet Disappeared

Gangi, Tehri, Uttarakhand

Right now, I am in the mountains, in a place called Gangi, the last village of Tehri district in Uttarakhand.

When I reached here yesterday evening, I found out that there was no mobile network.

Honestly, I was worried.

How will I live without the internet?

No calls.

No social media.

No constant notifications.

No scrolling.

For a moment, being disconnected felt like a problem.

But after spending one day without connectivity, something unexpected happened.

I started feeling more content.

More peaceful.

And, strangely, more connected with myself.

There is no mobile app here constantly eating my precious time. I don’t keep reaching for my phone every few minutes. There is nothing waiting for me on the screen.

So I started looking around.

And I noticed something else.

People here seem more connected to each other.

They talk.

They sit together.

They know their neighbours.

Life seems slower, but somehow it feels more alive.

And it made me think about the modern world.

We are more connected than ever through technology, yet sometimes we seem to be becoming less connected to ourselves and to the people standing right beside us.

We call it modernization.

But I sometimes wonder:

Are we really moving forward if, in the process, we lose the things that made us human?

Maybe progress isn’t always about having more technology.

Maybe sometimes progress means knowing when to put it down.

Sitting here in the mountains, without a mobile signal, I came to a strange realization:

I thought I had lost my connection to the world.

Instead, I found a connection with myself.

Maybe we haven’t lost our roots completely.

Maybe they’re still there.

Quietly waiting for us to disconnect from the noise long enough to remember them.

Field Note #001

Sometimes losing the signal helps us find ourselves.