"Hello, baat toh karen, I will buy you a laptop, new phone, anything you want...reply karen pls." (Hello, please talk to me, reply back) urged the contents of a text from a random number one night.

Hello, I was born goongi (mute), how to reply dear Bhaijaan (brother) was how I envisioned typing back in anger before blocking the number.

The parallel desi world that opens its shutters after sundown was alive: operating phone to phone and looking for preys to fall for its charm.

As someone who has recently moved to Pakistan, I've been astonished to discover the shady business between strangers over smartphones.

This late night Pakistan, of cellular networks, is brimming with lust — a far cry from the religious cape it dons during the daytime.

In a society where open romantic interaction with the opposite sex is given the thumbs down, all it takes is procuring a number to start your 'inbox wala luv'.

Desperate Majnus somehow find their smoldering Lailas, and then they embark on a journey where pictures are exchanged, future kids are named, etc.

But not before the I love yous of course. In many countries, these three words are deemed highly precious but in South Asia, no one shies away from commitment — so long as it's online.

It may seem like harmless fun for those who are single, but the plot thickens once you realise that the married ones are all the more involved in such bold acts.

Take a look: Cheating spouses keep Pakistani private detective busy

The seemingly shy Mrs Down-the-block or the 'pious' uncle in your building may all be hiding a dark secret on their phones.

With the use of social media rampant in our lives, cheating on partners is a click away. The terms of fidelity have been compromised and most practitioners seem to have accepted this as a 'modern thing to do'.

Is this then what the heart aches for?

We lament about the 'regressive' dynamics of our forefathers' marriages. Most of us, at some point, have asked one of our grandparents this: 'so you mean to say you never met him/her before your shaadi?'.

To our generation, it seems like their marriage was one of compromise, of loving someone forcefully and building a family simply due to lack of freedom or choice.

While that may be true at some level but marriages of the past had one aspect that has gone missing today: resilience. Today, a lot of us are increasingly second guessing ourselves.

Also read: Is celebrating love not a part of our culture?

We are bombarded daily by visuals which reduce people to objects. We are being taught that our worth in the world is only measured by conventional physical attractiveness.

Our addiction to the virtual world mean sometimes getting up in the middle of the night to check notifications.

This 'bechaini' drives us to live online, reducing the importance of real world connections: if we are seeing it, eating it, wearing it — it needs to be announced to feel validated.

Inboxes today represent rooms where quick connections of the shallow kind are made and broken off without the real-life partner having any inkling of this unscrupulous business on the password-protected phones.

With the passage of time and the world turning into a global village, desis have jubilantly exchanged all their eastern values for everything Western because for us 'the gora is always right'. But this isn't necessarily true.

Cheating is considered taboo in other parts of the world as well. And issues are bound to crop up when there is lack of transparency or it is one-sided only. We invite long periods of loneliness for when we give away ourselves too easily at the cost of our real relationships.

Examine: The big gamble

The kind of families being built today by pillars of a unit, who are emotionally absent and easily tempted by the 'sexiness' of existence, will not be able to hold their ground.

As faithfulness gets ranked lower and lower, the cracks on the walls of our morality, culture-wise, should be an area of concern for all.

The adage 'apne zameer main jhankiye' (look into your conscience) can easily be replaced with 'apne phone main jhankiye' (look into your phone) for that is where the truth lies.