Every morning, the Delhi Metro runs its own little sociological experiment, and I happen to be its unpaid, mildly nosy observer.
Most of us are exactly where you'd expect us to be: thumbs scrolling on autopilot, eyes glazed over a reel we won't remember by the next stop, or talking loudly enough that the entire coach is now looped into our personal business — right up until the tunnel eats the network and cuts us off mid-sentence, leaving us staring at a frozen call screen like it personally betrayed us.
And then, somewhere in that crowd, there's always one. A kid with a book open, headphones nowhere in sight, phone nowhere in sight — completely somewhere else entirely. Not performing calm the way people perform productivity on LinkedIn. Actually calm. I've clocked the same thing at parks and picnics: no phones passed around for photos, just paperbacks, real eye contact, and conversation that doesn't pause every ninety seconds for a notification. Frankly, it's a little suspicious.
It sent me into a mild spiral. Did my generation simply forget how to read? I grew up inhaling storybooks through entire summer vacations, racing to finish the new Anandamela before Pujo even properly began. Now? Two books a year, if I'm being generous with myself — and honestly, I don't even think that counts as "reading" anymore, more like reading's distant, guilt-inducing cousin.
So I started collecting questions the way you collect loose change — absentmindedly, without quite noticing the pile growing.
Why do the young choose books over reels? Texts over calls? A quiet, considered email over a noisy, ever-pinging WhatsApp group?
Is it simply a preference for quiet over chaos? A private, internal soundtrack that isn't noise to them the way our scattered, ping-heavy heads feel noisy to us?
Then I noticed something closer to home — literally, sitting in my own hand. Why do I clutch my phone the way you'd clutch a passport at immigration, white-knuckled and paranoid, when my bag has a perfectly good, zipped-up pocket built for exactly this purpose?
Two old memories answered that faster than I expected, arriving almost on cue.
A classmate once had her bag slit open from the bottom with a blade while she was simply boarding a train — and just like that, gone was the phone she'd bought with her own hard-earned internship money. Another friend was on a bus, headphones in, music playing, completely unaware, when the sound suddenly jumped from inside her ears to the open air around her. Someone had slipped the phone clean out of her back pocket and off the moving bus, all within the few seconds it takes a bus to pull away from a stop.
And it wasn't just us and our circle — there were countless other stories floating around too, news reports and viral videos of phones vanishing in broad daylight, seemingly designed to keep the fear alive and well-fed.
You don't forget lessons like that. You don't even consciously decide to change. You just quietly rearrange your habits around the fear — like always keeping your phone in your hand, where you can feel its weight and know, second by second, that it's still yours.
And if you're a woman, there's an extra, infuriatingly practical layer to this. Men's jeans come with pockets deep enough to swallow a phone whole and forget about it. Ours? Decorative slits that can barely hold a metro card, let alone a six-inch smartphone. It's such an old, normalized inconvenience that most of us don't even register it as unfair anymore — we've just adapted, the way women have adapted to a hundred small design choices that were never really made with us in mind. So while a man can casually drop his phone into a pocket and forget it exists, a lot of us are left holding ours simply because there's nowhere else for it to safely go. What looks like an anxious habit is, in some cases, just bad tailoring dressed up as a life skill.
That, I think, is the real answer. It isn't addiction dressed up as vigilance. It's vigilance that slowly calcified into pure reflex, somewhere around the time smartphones became expensive enough to be worth stealing. The data on theft itself is murky at best — there's no clean statistic proving it's actually risen — but phone recovery has genuinely improved, since the police can now track a lost or stolen phone in ways that simply weren't possible a decade ago.
Gen Z, though? A lot of them grew up after that particular anxious window closed, in a Delhi Metro that already felt safer, cleaner, and more watched than the one we learned our caution in. They never had to build the reflex, because the world never handed them a reason to. So they read. In public. With both hands free, completely unbothered, with zero passing suspicion that a bus might swallow their phone whole mid-journey.
I arrived at this beautifully tidy little conclusion just as the metro pulled into Sikanderpur. Thought complete, ego mildly pleased with its own cleverness.
And then I got off the train, and — without even thinking about it — put my phone straight back into my hand.
Because it's one thing to have a lovely, well-argued theory about safety.
It's an entirely different thing to bet it against my new iPhone 17.
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