Imagination

The power of imagination is endless. But is this power getting weaker or stronger with current generation? When I was growing up, my imaginative power was quite acknowledgeable. But lately (I mean past 6-7 years), I seem to have lost that touch. My world has become very practical, no complaints though.

While growing up, I used to hear news from radio, and was able to imagine of how that could have occurred in the real world. I used to hear lots of stories and gossips from friends and family and relate to their experiences in my imagination. I used to just lay back on my terrace and imagine about the life inside the Aeroplanes flying above in the sky. Until my entry to United States, every news about the other countries was pictured pretty much in my imagination, like how they spend their day to day life, what they eat, how they communicate, where they go for vacation, etc etc...

But lately, with so much improvement in technology everything is presented in picture, leaving none to your imagination. For ex, when you hear a good song, you would like to picture in your head about the feelings or expressions expressed in the song, but now I tend to hear songs only by looking at their videos where nothing is needed to be imagined. Also with the availability of 24x7 reality TV shows, WIFI enabled phones, portable video players, everything is available to you in visuals, completely disconnecting you from your imaginative world.

The major issue I see with lack of imagination is, it makes your mind dumb and not to work hard, eventually removing any kind of creativity your mind might have had. As a prevention to this, necessary steps I am taking is to reduce TV watching, read books, and hear news than watching them. This way at least I can try to open imaginative doors in my head.

Reading about something, picturing in your head, and then watching it on screen, provides a different level of happiness. It is so cool to see how your imaginations match to the reality on the screen. How I can say this is, I read only one book till now (I mean complete book) that is "Kite Runner" and watched the movie on TV and felt kinda strange happiness when my imaginations of places and characters came to life on the screen. Even though the book is far better than a movie, I still had great amount of excitement watching it. May be, that is the reason why there is cult following for the movies made based of popular books  like Harry Potter, where people go watch them to connect their imaginations to the reality.

Without the technology, these movies could have never been made, so that's why I am not sure whether the technology is having positive or negative influence on your imagination. To me, I like to experience in my imagination first and then use technology to experience my imagination.