 It has become a natural part of us now to reach to our phones for things way beyond making a call. Waiting for someone or in between moments have become easy to pass. But are we losing out on raw, phone-free communication in the process? It is wonderful to see cafes that are encouraging people to read and spend time with books and spend time with each other and not just the keypads of their phone. How comfortable is it for me to just turn around and start talking to somebody? Maybe share my story, hear a bit of theirs. It may or may not always work, right? Like this is a very friendly bunch of people but I'm not always sure. There is an organization that has given this a bit of structure with the human book. The Human Library actually started 17 years back in Copenhagen, Denmark as a platform to encourage face-to-face conversation. Having grown over the years as a space where people with stories as diverse as life as an unemployed person to living with HIV or abuse become human books for an audience to gather around and listen to it made its way into India recently with multi-city events that had a large response. We are at a time in our country where there are so many factors, social factors that need to be looked at in different perspectives and I think Human Library is a great platform for something like that because it's about interpersonal communication that communicates best to you. Like, you know, you will change your perspective about something if I sit with you on a table and tell you what my story is rather than send a book across to your house or send a text message saying hey this is what's happening in my life, people are books here. So we give them titles, we give them a description and we ask them to talk and tell us their story. Good evening, thank you for coming and my book is about Buddhism in daily life. Mr. Krishna Varma. I'm Gaurav Shimmer and I'm your book on Himalayan conservation. And Gaurav Shimmer are two such human books who felt the free and voluntary space they got to share their lives as a Buddhist and conservationists respectively was something they had been edging to do. And which now spread all over the world thanks to Sokka Gakkai which in India is known as Bharat Sokka Gakkai and Sokka Gakkai really means value creation. It's creating value within our own lives. We have an entire lopsided model of tourism happening in the mountains. So many people from the plains, they go, they set up resorts, hotels over there and whereas the locals are not benefiting. So me and my teams, we have been doing efforts over years, more than a decade now to somehow help sustainable tourism establish in the mountains. The readers who came to me, they were from housewives to professionals and there were a lot of youth, I was surprised. A number of youth were keen to know what exactly the whole thing was about and they had a lot of questions, especially in today's world. The whole world is almost in a chaos. Everywhere that you go, things are just topsy-turvy. To see a person who's been through so much and our stories in themselves is much more impactful on a one-to-one basis any day. This helps us in bringing out that life force that's there within us which I have been able to communicate with them. And in fact after the event also, there have been people who have been trying to reach out to me and trying to be connected to this sort of philosophy which I follow. It is clear that face-to-face conversations still intrigue people and hold value but it loses out somewhere when you have a large number of people that are only too happy to have ways to communicate today where face-to-face interaction is actually down to zero. Now the world is too large to understand which camp is bigger or which camp is smaller but this actually goes back to a time when people would write each other letters for way more than staying in touch and actually try and write things that they felt were best communicated written. With virtual proximity today, that communication can be instant. Apurva Chaudhary is a content writer at a news portal and her date does involve a lot of human interaction but her phone is what she looks into when it's anything to do with Concentration and writing to my boss. So, I meet people every day all the time and in my job that is important but when I have to confront somebody about something, be emotional and angry I would definitely do it on text or on email rather than doing it face-to-face and writing to my boss for leave is another thing which I'm scared to do on face so I write emails or I do it on WhatsApp. For Rachna, an accountant at the organic food and coffee venture Jagmakthela texting lets her remain a happy introvert. Sometimes for me it's 99% more convenient to say that if you just have to say I love you, you just need to send a heart with that and nothing else that completes your messages. Now it is wonderful to have initiatives like the Human Library but a fair conclusion would be that just like the casino in the end technology always wins as even for FaceTime they have created tools. .