India, May 9 -- Smartphones are getting smarter by the day. The phone we buy today seems to be of the rock age in a year. The yearly launch of the upgraded versions of phones has a hidden message: Stay abreast or face the risk of being left behind in this tech-driven world. Ironically, however, smartphone users are losing their basic skills to navigate, calculate, estimate and contemplate. Weather apps on our phones have become audacious enough to tell us that though it's 9 degrees Celsius outside though it feels colder like 5 degrees. Isn't it like playing mind games? Gone are the days when we would try to learn multiplication tables by heart. Our teachers used to applaud students who could memorise tables up to 20. Phones have robbed us of simple skills of addition, subtraction and multiplication. Nowadays, almost everyone relies on their phone to calculate even the smallest of transactions. Spell check has made sure that we need not worry about the spellings which we so painstakingly learnt during childhood. Emojis ensure we need not express ourselves in many words, further snatching our skill of framing sentences. And now with the advent of verbal commands, we are on the way to losing even our typing skills. Online shopping has lent a severe blow to our bargaining skills. Earlier, my wife used to double check the price and quality of the vegetables from at least two greengrocers before buying but the online apps have taken away that pleasure, too. Luring smartphone users with the pictures of mouth-watering dishes and money saving combos by food delivery apps have made sure that our food choices are also being monitored by artificial intelligence. We aren't confident of travelling even in our own city without the help of the navigation app. A robotic voice tells us to take the shortest possible route that may lead us into a narrow street from where our car can't even pass through. So much so that we have become wary of asking for directions as we tend to rely more on Google maps than on our natural instincts and fellow human beings. Recently, there has been a spate of incidents where people have ended up landing at the weirdest of places because of the almighty Google. In some unfortunate cases, the virtual map-aided trips have led to serious accidents that could have been avoided simply by the presence of mind. A few months ago, my brother-in-law along with his family set out to pay obeisance at the Kali Mata Mandir in Patiala. As they were going to Patiala for the first time, they decided to follow the Google map right from their home in Amritsar. Trying to follow the shortest possible route as suggested by the app, they ended up in a remote village. Finding themselves at the end of the road, they spotted a few people playing cards under a tree. When asked for directions, first they had a hearty laugh and then said, "You also must have followed Google. We have to redirect the lost ones quite often." While our phones, armed with artificial intelligence and advanced features, have become a force to reckon with, we are losing our confidence, analytical skills, and natural intelligence at a worrying pace....