No Internet Day, anyone?

That unbearably light purveyor of heavy existential themes, Milan Kundera, has written a novel called Life Is Elsewhere. Remarkably, it is not about cyber addicts. But it should have been.

With reports coming in that scientists have just perfected a new, improved version of the Internet, called 'the Grid', which will be 10,000 times faster than today's broadband, life (or what is left of it) can only recede further into Elswhereistan.

According to David Britton, the Nerd Number One working on this project, 'the Grid' will revolutionise society. Sure. Like hell it will.

It will only transform our planet - already suffering under the misrule of a trans-national elite composed exclusively of mendacious, power-hungry sociopaths - into a laboratory of atomized, earning-consuming, self-computing particles with vestigial human characteristics.

Of course, as (pre-paid) experts keep telling us, you can't stop the onward march of technology. Have you ever wondered how, for example, advances in anti-virus software march hand in hand with the new advanced viruses they are designed to destroy?

That is why, now is the time - before our brains collectively start taking orders from the Grid, which, co-incidentally, sounds a lot like 'the Matrix' - to institute a holiday from the Grid, which is the Internet ka baap, as it were.

I propose that we should start observing, by way of a feeble inoculation against the further enfeeblement of the real world by the virtual, a No Internet Day every year. Just like we celebrate Women's Day once every year so we can harass womankind without any sense of guilt the remaining 364 days.

On No Internet Day, the World Wide Web will be shut down all over the planet. Nobody - not even the CIA - should be able to log in.

Human rats all over the world will scurry to their office caves and discover that their workplace is full of other human rats, and not just computers with automatons plugged into them.

All BPO proles and call centre coolies can, on this day, live up to their reputation by smoking pot and making out in their offices, which will remain open, but with no internet connection. Professional spammers will glare in impotent rage at their prone, red-eyed mouses, and no matter how many times they click it, they won't manage to send out even one e-mail exhorting men, women, and prime ministers to enlarge their respective penises.

Journalists, without access to Google, will be forced to hit the streets and expose their bodies to natural light and unconditioned air.

As for the stock markets, well, I don't understand what those so-called brokers do anyway, millions of them signaling and shouting and staring at screens like zombies looking for souls misplaced. Whatever it is that they do, yakking endlessly about bulls and bears with that air of moronic self-importance - they won't get to do it for one whole day.

And if you are one half of a working couple, and want to convince your wife/girlfriend that you did indeed miss her for at least 3.5 seconds during the day, sending her hugs on Yahoo Chat and SMS-ing her to log in and collect it won't do.

You actually have to transport yourself into physical proximity with her, and hug her bodily - with your own ten-fingered hands with dirt-laden nails and cholesterol-laden blood coursing through them. Think of that! Fifty years into life under the Grid - that could be truly revolutionary, if the Grid hasn't outlawed No Internet Day by then.

Exciting as this scenario sounds, I doubt if such a day will ever come to be instituted. Not because the evil military-industrial-technological complex will never allow it - though that is one reason - but more because we no longer have the power to survive being unwired.

To take my own example, I am by no means a geek - in fact, I abhor technology and computers. I prefer talking to typing. I'd rather make eye contact with the person I'm communicating with than with a totally expressionless computer monitor that is taking the opportunity to shoot trillions of malignant microwaves into my retina every second.

But even I - a lapsed Luddite, if you like - start getting nervous tics in my fingers if I go without checking my e-mail for more than 90 minutes. After 130 minutes, I start getting palpitations and my mouse-deprived palms become sweaty.

After five hours, if I still haven't had an opportunity to type in my username and password, my blood pressure dips to dangerous levels, and I start hallucinating about jumping into the sea and swimming on my own through tsunami-size waves to the island of my favourite website whose name I can't tell you for no particular reason. But that's my limit - five hours.

And I am told that the threshold is much lower in the case of bloggers and game fanatics, some of whom died recently because they were unable to tear themselves from their computers for even a few hours, for life accessories like sleep, eating, and crapping. I imagine it will be a dry and difficult day for porn addicts, too, though I can't really tell because I have never surfed porn in my entire life.

In fact, no man ever surfs porn, under normal circumstances. But the shutting down of the Internet is just the kind of abnormal circumstance that can set off in any human being a tremendous urge to access porn, and once a person comes under the sway of such an overpowering force, there is no saying how long he or she might survive such an attack - a few hours, half a day, may be, but an entire day? I doubt it.

And that is why ultimately the No Internet Day will remain a non-starter, though God knows our species needs it. But that doesn't mean we can't try. After all, we do need a day to remind ourselves that life is not in the Internet; it is, and alas, always will be, elsewhere.