Science & Tech Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

Refusing the internet, in 21st-century public life, reads less like a quaint lifestyle choice than a deliberate aesthetic stance: a writer building a moat around attention. Lahiri’s phrasing keeps tightening the circle. “Never had Internet access” is absolute, then immediately qualified by the almost comically modest confession of having “looked at things on other people’s computers as a bystander.” That “bystander” is doing real work. It casts the digital world as an event happening to others, a spectacle one witnesses without consenting to belong to it.

The line about email accounts is similarly revealing: “A few times… twice actually.” The self-correction makes the refusal feel honest rather than performative, but it also hints at the pressure of modern participation. She’s not pretending the portal never tempted her; she’s admitting she tried the doorknob and chose to step back. For an author whose fiction often examines translation, displacement, and interiority, the subtext isn’t technophobia so much as a defense of inwardness. Connectivity promises access, but it also installs a low-grade obligation to be reachable, reactive, and public.

The final clause, “right now,” keeps the door ajar, signaling discipline rather than dogma. In a culture that treats constant presence as professionalism, Lahiri frames absence as a valid mode of authorship: not anti-modern, but pro-concentration. The quote works because it’s quiet rebellion without swagger; it makes solitude sound like craft, not nostalgia.