Stop surfing, make friends.....

Students at India's premier institute IITB (Indian Institute of Technology,Bombay) have been barred from free internet access from 11pm to 12.30 pm. Authorities at IITB believe that the ban would encourage students to socialize with their colleagues which in turn would lead to low degree of depression and suicides among the students.
Link to the article.

So, whats up? What am I thinking???

First of all, neither I'm an expert on the subject matter nor I'm affected by this sanction as I'm not a student of IITB. And secondly, who on the planet earth care about my opinion, anyways?

But guys, as 24th of march approaching, which is international computer shutdown day (I voted for "Yes, I can") this news got me thinking....
No internet for 13 and a half hours everyday??? Thats cruelty man...
For one day its okay...but everyday??? no..no..nope....
Ofcourse, every coin has two sides, and students might hook up to internet for longer hours at night downloading, chatting, blogging, but, who would go knock on the neighbor's door at 11.00 pm and strike a conversation just to socialize? And these are IITians..they would definitely circumvent the system and find other ways to go online. Also, there are many other ways to restrain from socializing, say for example, reading or watching cable TV.
I admit, most of the times, surfing is a wastage of time as this is the era of information overload. You can't get enough ever... But at the same time, this is the right time to understand what internet really is for. I mean, c'mon guys, you don't have to check your e-mails every 10 minutes or you don't have to be on messenger 24X7? Either facebook or myspace or orkut or ringo, only one of these profiles is enough to maintain second life. How many RSS feeds you wanna add to your reader? You gotta define your area of interest and you gotta limit the no of feeds too cuz almost all news rss feeds are almost same.(Not talking about Blog Rss feeds :) )

IITians are considered the best minds in India and surely they understand whats right or wrong for them. So let the verdict be left to the students....

Here are some interesting posts related to the issue

Roti, kapda aur Internet by Rashmi Bansal

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