My weekdays start with sweeping my fingers across the mobile screen to turn down the harsh cacophony of the alarm on phone, followed by an instant downward swipe to check my notifications, mostly whatsapp messages. Then come facebook and twitter and finally, I proceed to get out of my bed. I end my day with an e-mail check (while the phone is charging from a demanding days’ worth of calling, tweeting, browsing and so on). I spend the last few hours of my day with my laptop writing assignments and doing projects (or at least trying to).

As an engineering student, my life revolves around the Internet. I knew that it would be close to impossible to do an experiment on my own of how to live a day without the Internet. So, I went ahead and tried to do what I thought was unthinkable until an eventful Wednesday, which meant I had live through the middle of the week without my life essential. To my surprise, the day was by no means uneventful although I felt completely disconnected.

7:00 am - My alarm went off and I reach for my phone, when I decided to give action to my plan. I quickly disabled the Internet on my phone before I could be tempted to see what my friends had gossiped in the class chat group.

8:45 am - I reach college and my classmates are raving about some funny 9gag post (which I happened to miss) and when I told them about this no internet endeavour of mine, they decided to keep me in the dark just to mess with my head.

11:15 am - I was in the middle of an Internet Network Security practical. The professor had just asked us to write an encryption program. While everyone lifted some code off the internet, I stood there flummoxed, contemplating whether to violate this self-imposed ban or stay put. And then the engineer within my soul arose. I copy pasted the program which my partner just downloaded and voila, I had the output. Sadly for us, the professor didn’t take long to figure out that the code was a straight lift. And we were back to square one, stuck in a rut trying to debug the shabby piece of ingenious code we had written.

1:15 pm - My stomach was growling and my taste buds were craving for a nice greasy cheeseburger. Most engineers seldom have double digit calling balance (but somehow manage to renew our internet packs right on time). So apparently, my friend has already whatsapped me ‘like a thousand times’ to come to the eatery while I stood at the gate expecting his call. I ate the chintzy college vada pav eventually just so that I do not die of hunger.

5:30 pm - I was all set to write 30 pages worth of assignments and then it struck me that I can’t use YouTube to stream my favourite EDM music. So, I ended up listening to whatever few songs I had on my phone and I continued writing, painstakingly surfing for answers through the textbook which was fat enough to serve as a makeshift pillow.

9:30 pm - I’m an avid FML (www.fmylife.com) reader. It’s my pre sleep ritual. But hey, no internet, so no FML. As I shut my eyelids, I thought to myself ‘It wasn’t so bad after all’.

A day without the internet starts from being a minor inconvenience and ends up being a torturous abnegation of what some may call today, a bare necessity. And when we speak of such a havoc, it would not just affect the Facebook addicted youth or the industries which would come to an absolute standstill, but even the students who depend on internet for assignments, college lecturers who use online resources to prepare lectures and business owners who take online orders.