Imagine living without phones!

Sometimes we take a lot of things for granted. We complain when our broadband lines go beserk after a heavy downpour. We complain when it takes Telekom more than a day to repair our phone. We complain when we couldn't send a message out using our mobile phones during one of the festive seasons. There are just so many things we gripe about each day that we don't realize we have it all.

Take a look at the other side of the world. Just somewhere nearby, about 3 hours plane flight away. Somewhere in South East Asia. I won't mention the country's name here just so I will not be arrested or deemed to be a threat to the country's security or even be suspected as one of their activists against the junta or the military government. If you know where this is, try searching for news on this politically unstable country on the net. There's almost no results. Go to Amazon.com, try to buy a book and then choose the shipping country, you'll find that this country is not listed. (OK, maybe I am exaggerating here a little bit but what good is it when you cannot sign-in and buy something off the net? Or when it arrives, you have to pay other fees other than duties and taxes just to collect it or it just gets lost before it reaches you) Or try registering for hotmail, no such country in their list either. We may not realize this is happening to the outside world so near us unless it affects a part of our own lives.

Imagine not having Astro (paid TV channels). Imagine not having English movies to watch in the cinema or on TV. Imagine not listening to Hitz FM. Imagine living without your mobile phone. Imagine living in a place where even your landline telephones don't work most of the time. Imagine living in a world where you have internet lines which are inacessible. And when you finally get the idea that internet lines do work at 5am in the morning, you find out that the government has shut down all secured sign-in websites (which includes your email accounts). The only way of communicating with the outside world is to fly out of the country and even for that, there are no daily flights out. Imagine living in a world where you are watched all the time. Any single mistake you make or any simple accidental action which the military may see as some political threat, you are dead. We never realize this is happening just a few footsteps away, so close yet it seems like the country is in outer space.

I rest my case.