That’s the question Electronic City, a play by Falk Richter, addresses. It will be performed on Saturday and Sunday at Max Mueller Bhavan.

The main characters, Tom and Joy, try to make sense of the world when their electronic devices abandon them. Endless halls and Blackberry-less amnesia threaten Tom as he tries to remember the location of his room, his appointments, his wife — even himself.

As he spirals into incoherence, halfway across the globe, his telephone-dependant wife Joy realises that a cornerstone of her work, the barcode scanner, has failed her.

While the characters grapple with device-withdrawal symptoms, the future cocks a snook at today.

Director Amitesh Grover decided to link the play with the BPO haven of Gurgaon. “I have seen the Gurgaon landscape change,” says Grover. “Yet it did not become a cityscape. Instead, building upon building, each with a complete world within, rose. It became a place you enter and forget what’s outside. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.”

He says he saw a close relative who had become so used to travelling around the globe for work that he never got jet-lagged: “I saw that he ate according to the clock, slept according to the clock; his body rhythm and the world were completely disconnected.”

Grover then searched for a script that would explain what was happening to the world around him.

“I chose Electronic City because it’s a play that hasn’t been done much and I decided to root it in our surroundings. I changed the text slightly to make it relevant to our scenario,” he says.

To create the effect of a multitasking world, Grover stages the play on an L-shaped platform with two simultaneous performances on each leg.

The effect is heightened by two large projections that keep changing with the mood of the characters.

“The audience will have to decide what to watch when,” says Grover. “Each person will piece together his own understanding of the play even though the fundamental parts of the story will be the same.”

He says the play is not just about dependence on technology.