Scrolling Through My Mobile… and Other Modern Misadventures

Ritu Kamra Kumar

Scrolling through my mobile this morning—an activity I now classify as cardio for the compulsively curious—I stopped at a picture of an old, peeling, time-tattered house with a caption that hit harder than my alarm clock:

“Only the mobile knows what kind of character its owner truly has.”

One blunt, beautiful, brutally honest line, staring at me with the same judgmental stillness my phone uses when it informs me that I’ve snoozed fourteen alarms. That decrepit house, with its cracked character and sagging soul, suddenly seemed to whisper, “Child, I have survived centuries of storms… but your phone has witnessed things even I would collapse from.”

In that moment, my mobile felt less like a device and more like a diary with a doctorate in psychology—mirror, mentor, monitor, and menace rolled into one sleek rectangle.

If character were a classroom, my mobile would be the strict invigilator—spectacles lowered, eyebrows raised—catching me cheating in the quiet test of life. It knows everything: my moods, my midnights, my million little meltdowns.

My 2:00 a.m. searches (“How to become confident… by tomorrow morning”).

My 2:15 a.m. despair (“How to sleep after overthinking”).

My 2:20 a.m. existential sprint (“What is the purpose of life? Kindly keep it short”). Even Shakespeare needed sprawling soliloquies to spill Hamlet’s secrets. My phone requires nothing more than my search bar.

Last week it had the audacity to offer me a personalized suggestion:

“New ways to stop procrastinating.” I didn’t click it. I procrastinated that too.

The image of the old house tugged a dusty thread of memory—my ancestral home, the one with fading frescoes, moody wooden doors, and shadows that stored stories like stubborn siblings unwilling to leave. When I visited years ago, my cousin whispered, “These walls know more family secrets than we ever will.” But now, my phone is the new ancestral house: same silence, same secrets, only auto-saved and available for download. If the house walls could talk, they would politely gossip. My phone, however, would publish an entire scandalous anthology titled: “My Human: A Case Study.”

And if we are confessing honestly—let me offer a tiny, humiliating anecdote. I once texted a friend, “I’m coming in 10 minutes,” while lying horizontal, cocooned in my blanket, contemplating the philosophical weight of leaving my bed. Annoyed by my dishonesty, my phone autocorrected “coming” to “combing,” gently exposing the fact that I was combing excuses, not my hair. Oscar Wilde famously said, “I can resist everything except temptation.”

If he had a smartphone, he would have added: “…and notifications with neon neediness.”

Jane Austen would have penned Pride and Prejudice and Push Notifications. T.S. Eliot might lament The Waste Land of My Screen Time. Even Kabir would have rewritten his wisdom into motivational wallpapers and morning alerts.

Mythology, too, would not be spared. Narad Muni, the celestial messenger, once travelled with a tambura; today he would carry an iPhone—forwarding screenshots instead of sowing rumours.

But nothing competes with the quiet comedy of the screenshot scandal. One morning, determined to be the heroine of my own productivity saga, I saved a motivational quote: “Be the best version of yourself.”

Within ten seconds, I betrayed it magnificently by watching a video titled:

“Cats Falling Dramatically for No Reason.” My mobile, exhausted by my ethical gymnastics, generated its weekly whim:

“Your screen time is up by 28%.” My productivity, for the record, was down by 98%. We claim our phones store memories. Truth is, they store our weaknesses—carefully, chronologically, cruelly. They know our deleted photos, impulsive purchases, emotional drafts never sent, midnight rambles, and Google searches revealing more about our souls than our journals dare.

My phone has witnessed my finest moments—optimistic, organised, oddly philosophical. But it has also seen me Googling: “Why do bad things happen to good people who only procrastinate sometimes?”

The picture of the crumbling house called me back. Old houses possess a noble stoicism; they endure storms without complaint, age without apology, and crack without collapsing. They keep their doors open even when their frames tremble. Meanwhile, I panic when my battery dips to 11%—behaving as though civilisation will crumble with it. Perhaps that is our modern satire: We carry ancient fears in futuristic devices. We store fragile truths in permanent clouds.

As sunlight spilled across the room, I scribbled a small ode—a soft salute to the wise old house and the wickedly honest phone:

O fading walls of forgotten days,

Your silence still sings ancient praise;

Yet here I scroll, my screen aglow,

Where secrets sleep and shadows grow;

One stands in ruins, one in code—

Both bearing stories never told.

Another misadventure belongs here—my mis-navigation moment. One evening I asked Google Maps to guide me home. It instructed, “Head north.” I blinked at the sky, turned in a slow uncertain circle, and wondered whether I should consult the stars or continue spinning like a confused ceiling fan. To its credit, the app recalculated—digitally, but I swear, also emotionally. And then the delightful irony of my phone’s spiritual instincts. Whenever I am sad or sulking, it suddenly suggests soulful videos: “Let go of what you cannot control.”

It recommends that wisdom while simultaneously refusing to let go of a stuck software update. That caption—Only your mobile knows your true character—returned like a refrain. Maybe it does know the private, petty, panicky parts of me. It knows my boredom, my bravery, my bravado. My urgent loneliness, my unexpected clarity, my unfinished thoughts.

But it also knows the long gratitude messages I type and never send, the poems I save, the photographs of sunsets I cannot stop capturing, the reminders I set for people I love, the book lists I hoard, the ideas I scribble at midnight. Maybe this, too, is character. Character is not carved from perfection. It is shaped from persistence—our stubborn, shimmering humanness. As I scrolled again, the old house on the screen seemed to murmur,

“I stand broken, yet whole. What about you?” I smiled because we all carry cracks—in our stories, in our screens, in our souls.

Maybe our phones do not expose us. Maybe they simply reflect us—our chaos, our confusions, our contradictions,

our little courage. So yes, my mobile knows me.

But more importantly, it nudges me to know myself—

one notification,

one misadventure,

one comforting comedy at a time.

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Setu, December 2025