Every morning, six-year-old Dewansh Arora rushes to his grandparents’ room to check if the battery of his iPad is fully charged, as per his instructions the night before.
Dewansh, a student of Class I at a prominent public school in Gurugram, is“hooked on gadgets”, complains his grandmother Raji Arora. The six-year-year spends most of his time playing on his iPad or the smartphones of family members.
“We try to keep tabs his use of gadgets but not very successfully; kids these days don't even want to go to the playground without them,” says Ms. Arora. “Dewansh wants the gadgets as soon as he wakes up.. He even takes his iPad to the local park to ‘play’ with friends who bring their own gadgets,” she says.
Tuition over, time for tab
Meanwhile, Vedansh, 7, and his cousin Vanya, 9, eagerly wait for their tuition class to get over as the minute hand on the vintage wall clock in their living room at west Delhi's Hari Nagar inches closer to 4 pm. In just a few minutes it will be time for them to play on their iPads and tablets.
“We try our best to strictly regulate their use of gadgets at home, but they still manage to spend at least two to three hours on them on a daily basis,” says Vedansh’s mother Bhavna Malhotra. “I make sure that he plays with his friends at the local park for an equal amount of time.”
Mock iPad, dummy cells
But, these days, even the games children play at the local park are not what they used to be, points out Vanya's mother Harsh Prabha Malhotra. “Role playing games like chor-police (cops and thieves) and pakdam-pakdai (catch me if you can) have been replaced by ‘classroom games where children play teachers giving lessons on mock tablets, little girls bring dummy phones and talk about forwarding Whatsapp messages to each other like their parents do at home,” she said.
Digital fitness regime
According to Sunil Bhati, a fitness enthusiast and property developer from Noida, it's not just the pre-teens who are heavily dependent on gadgets. “These days, the teenagers download workout videos before undertaking even the most basic exercise,” he complains. “Many from a group of boys I train at the local park refuse to get out of bed if they haven't been able to download the latest exercise routine from YouTube the previous night,” he adds.
