Restaurants, cafes and the like are for eating and drinking, right?

That's a no-brainer, you say?

That's your reflex, I'd say.

Now, think. Rewind your mind. What do you recall?

Aren't restaurants and cafes the new temples of learning?

For youngsters - high-school students, collegians and university scholars - trendy cafes are the new meeting points, joint-study centers, favorite hangouts.

What you witness is small groups reading-writing, eating-sipping, browsing-downloading, copying-pasting, joking-smiling, banding-bonding. Action starts late morning or around noon, and could go on till late evening, sometimes well past midnight, weather permitting.

Barring holidays, youngsters are at it day after day, as if there's no tomorrow, as if they are in a race against time to upload as much knowledge as quickly as possible into their internal memory storage drives called brains (whose capacity, it appears, expands automatically, exponentially, every day).

I suspect youngsters simply love the bright bluish-white radiation from phone, tablet or laptop displays bouncing off their faces, giving them a surreal glow.

It wasn't like this before.

Previous generations of students would visit cafes for coffee, tea, soft drinks or snacks, maybe indulge in a bit of good-natured banter with their "gang" members, or smoke a cigarette on the sly.

For exam-related study, there were designated quiet areas in city libraries or the college library.

Back in my Indian hometown during the late '80s and the early '90s, a handful of my classmates and I would gather at our homes, taking turns, in the run-up to key exams. During such "night-outs", we would study, exchange notes, share insights, brainstorm to solve tricky problems, anticipate test questions, and prepare accordingly.

Not infrequently, we would digress and discuss cricket, movies, film stars and, of course, girls (and their attributes, to put it gently).

Once in a while, elders would sneak in to our territory, ostensibly to supply cups of hot coffee or tea to keep us awake, but to also check if all is well and according to the stated objective of joint study.

Digital-age kids do it differently now. Why? I can only guess.

The foremost reason is free Wi-Fi and all that it offers (which is a lot).

The environment at institutional libraries may not be to millennials' liking.

Perhaps, today's youth need the reassuring commercial air-conditioned ambience and the surround sound of noisy eateries - background music, customer chatter, traffic, clatter of china, chop sticks, spoons and forks, their own conversation - to absorb knowledge.

Or, is it big pocket money or salary earned from part-time jobs? Maybe, just a generational thing, a lifestyle trend, or the result of the single-child system.

I've noticed girl-boy bonding beats same-gender banding. Puppy love to romantic love to happy marriage to two kids (new normal, by the way) - not inconceivable. One of my younger colleagues, a business journalist, last month married her childhood sweetheart, a cardiac surgeon, and, she told me, it all started back at school.

So, the restaurant rendezvous may have its utility. It promotes real-life interactions, so critical when addiction to online social media is seen making youth unsociable.

Contact the writer at siva@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 03/24/2017 page2)