Chapter 12 Zen - his story (1/2)

Zen and Chris were sharing a tent and their tent was adjacent to the tent occupied by Tina and Nanu.The boys had occupied tents at the extreme ends kept the tents of the 5 girls and their teacher in the middle.

As soon as the girls called it a day and headed for their tents to sleep, the boys also decided to move towards their respective tents. Zen and Chris said goodnight to the rest and headed to the other end of the tents where they had pitched their tent. It was towards the cliff side.

Zen was excited about the camping trip and had jotted down a lot of things he felt were important. Zen was one of the intelligent persons with real high I.Q. He was an expert in computers and especially in programming. He played video games and was an expert. He had even created a character for a video game when the company had advertised a competition for creation of characters. He had made two prototypes. One he gave to the company and he had no claim on it as it was now company property. All those who had created the characters were acknowledged for the creation by the company's website and were given some payment as a reward. The other character was equally good and many wanted to buy it. He had received requests on his email asking him to sell this character. But he was not interested in selling his creation. Can one patent a gaming character? He had no idea. But when he got home he was planning to find out about that. He could think of making such characters for future games. Who knows, maybe within a few years he would float his own gaming company.

He started to go through his notes so as to put them to memory. It is said that if you read before sleeping, whatever you read is stored in your memory in special brain boxes and whenever this information is needed it can be recalled easily.

After going through his notes he got into his sleeping bag and saw that his tent mate was also getting into his sleeping bag.

But sleep was far from entering his eyes. The eyes would open as soon as he tried to close them. He could see Chris tossing and turning in his sleeping bag. Though a sleeping bag does not have much space to move around in but one can move around a little.

He was also restless and unable to sleep. After all, it was not his bed and his bedroom at home. The comfort of one's bed and one's home is the best.

Lights were out and there was nothing to do to pass time till sleep would take over. Without phones life was extremely difficult. He could not use his phone and he had not brought any books to read. Even if he had brought a book or two, no one would have let him read it due to the issue of saving torchlight. He could not even read his favorite novels on web-novels.

An rightly informed by Zia ma'am there were no telephone towers at this altitude and there were no landline cables; hence, no connectivity. There was no mobile data which meant no what's app, no social networking site, no YouTube, etc.Zen knew they were cut off from everyone. He also wondered how people managed when there was no connectivity in the past before mobiles and internet. He was from the present day generation and regarded that period prior to the coming of mobile phones with internet facilities as practically the formatting of the present era.

However, most kids regarded that time as practically the dark ages. In the 1980s, you had those landline phones which were the push button types. Earlier than that, the phones had a dialing system where slots were from numbers 1 to 0 and you had to place your index finger in one slot then dial it all the way around one after another to dial a number and call someone. His father used to tell him all these things. Even with those type of phones mankind was able to launch numerous space visits including a landing on the moon in 1969. Progress is a continuous process and it takes time.

Anyway, it was quite peaceful without phones ringing everywhere. He was always disgusted watching people on their mobiles all the time. Even when driving or while crossing the road one would encounter such persons who could not stay away from their mobiles even for a minute. These chaps were a hazard to others as well as themselves and was quite a major cause of accidents as they walked looking into their phones and drove while looking into their phones. Technology had its disadvantages too.

In the morning he would try to get the help of Zia ma'am to contact his parents. They all had been interacting with their friends and family till the forest area.The guest-house should be having a system whereby they could contact their relatives just to tell them that they were safe. If the guest-house could not help then, of course, there was the Sat phone with Luke Sir.He had mentioned that he possessed one when they were trekking to this camping site.