Why I don’t do Whatsapp groups

There is a reason I consciously stay away from Whatsapp groups. These groups are usually filled with a deluge of fake news, forwarded messages, inspirational quotes written by questionable authors, blessings from God, and low-IQ jokes I do not need to read. Some of these jokes are so sexist and misogynistic that I am surprised women (and men) share, read, enjoy, and smiley-emoticonize them. Most of these stereotype women as shopping-maniacs, mother-in-law-haters, diamond-hungry (from the husband) people who are unable to stand up for themselves. Then there are saints walking on water, doctors performing medical miracles and transplanting the liver where the lungs should be, dating and mating tips no one needs to know, and so on. You can see why I am wary of these groups.

However, sometimes, I share my number with specific individuals because there was a need to stay in touch or sync up at some point of time. "Let's meet in downtown at 6 pm. Send me a Whatsapp message when you get there." That kind of thing. But then, some of them start sending me good morning messages and inspirational quotes every day. Why? Did I ask for them? These messages are usually appended by multi-colored flowers or sunrises in the background. Why am I being sent these? Why don't these messages stop even when I am not responding to them? 

Sometimes, my phone dings a good morning message in the evening, just because it is morning in some other part of the world. Sometimes, there are twenty quotes by Einstein that Einstein never said. Am I missing some social etiquette that I am supposed to know, etiquette where you wake up and instead of making coffee or using the bathroom, start roll calling random people good morning messages?

All these messages get muted first, and then blocked for life. But my question is, if that person was walking in front of me, in person, would they repeat the same thing that they just sent me? Imagine waiting at the bus stop and someone walks by me, suddenly shouting, "Good morning! You look like a flower today. Strength does not come from physical capacity, but from will." Or someone stopping by in my office and saying, "When a girl says that she can't live without you, she has made up her mind that you are her future." Or, "For every girl with a broken heart, there’s a guy there with a glue gun." Who is this making such sweeping generalizations? And why are they sharing these nuggets of wisdom unsolicited, even though they never hear back from me? 

I am not asocial by any stretch of imagination, far from it. Those who have met me know that I can talk about different things for hours. But again and again, I find myself at a loss for words when someone shouts out that "The Indian national anthem just won the best anthem award of the world by the UN," or "Good morning friend, have a nice Sunday, be with someone who is good for your mental health." Because, you, my unsolicited Whatsapp friend, are certainly not good for my mental health.

I was cell phone-free for 2 years, between 2014 and 2016. Those were the best two years of my life.
sunshine

Kon-Maring My Facebook

Of late, Kon-Maring my Facebook feed is the best thing that I have done for myself. As clichéd as this complaint sounds, I was being inundated with life-changing updates from people Facebook has bestowed celebrity status upon, updates I did not care to know about. I tried a couple of approaches of weeding these updates out, but like weeds, they kept growing and coming back, haunting me and showing me how meaningless and devoid of color my life was. Finally, I found my way out of this maze from the public propaganda of private matters.

Why was this important?

Unwanted information on Facebook is of two kinds.

I. Fast poison: News of violence, death, rape, murder, and the millions of opinions surrounding it from people who have no stake in it. Terrorism in Kashmir. Irom Sharmila Chanu’s fasting and the AFSPA. The outrage caused by Trump. Gun violence in the US. Terrorism in Europe. And the millions of discussions surrounding it that at the core level spark nothing more useful than anger, fear, sadness, and apathy.

Newspapers were meant to inform people. Now with Facebook, everyone had a voice, and everyone wanted to talk about what they thought of what they read. Looks like it doesn’t take much to outrage people either. Why is everyone looking for the recent Olympic medalist’s caste? Why are Indians not winning medals at the Olympics to begin with? My response would be why do you care about people looking at castes? Or why are you outraged by India’s Olympic performance when chances are high that you have never trained for one yourself? Why do you have to take every piece of information you read like a pile of shit and fling it around for others to smell on Facebook? Why do you need to engage with everything?

Friendships are put to test under the weight of political stances, armchair activism and people’s inability to respect differing or alternative opinions. In short, these things poison you fast.

II. Slow poison: Things I do not really need to know about. What you ate. What color lipstick you wore. How frequently your baby pooped. How Twinkle Khanna lashed out on Naseeruddin Shah and Karan Johar followed suit. What Shobha De said about India’s performance in the Olympics. Motherhood dare. Black and white challenge. Sari and ghagra challenge. How much shit I can spread around challenge. People engage. People bicker and argue. And people keep stoking the fire.

I was beginning to feel a growing sense of claustrophobia in this virtual space. Earlier this month, I turned 35, and now see more grey hair on my head than I have ever seen before. I am probably past half my time here, and still have so many things to experience. Is this what I am meant to read every morning? The brain-excreta of 900-odd people I had accrued as “friends” at some point? I have the right to shut-out information, just like I have the right to seek-out information. My wall was beginning to look like a battleground, and sometimes, an excreta-ground. Everyone had opinions. No matter how neutral I tried to keep it, everyone wanted to tell me how they disagree. I knew that it was time for me to disengage. My brain has a limited ability to soak up information, and I was done with this he-said-she-said and they-did-they-didn’t spatter of words. I wanted to read things that are more calming, creative, and uplifting.

What I was doing wrong?

I disappeared from Facebook once in a while, but kept coming back as it felt lonely. It’s a lot like dieting to lose weight. If you suddenly give up on food, you will only come back to binge before you know. Then, I started to weed out people. People I did not know. People I have never met. People I am not likely to meet. People I have not spoken in five years or so. But that only took me so far, bringing down the number close to 800.

Then, I started selectively “unfollowing” people whose updates were toxic. I recognized strange patterns in people’s behavior. Some only posted close up images of the makeup they wore. Some only shared news of shooting and violence. Some only spoke in numbers. Published five papers in six months. Ate nine kinds of starters in two hours. Traveling my seventeenth country. Visiting the ninth national park. Giving my eighth talk this year. Wearing my twenty fifth sari. Did ninety pushups at the gym today (hashtag loveyourbody). This quantification of achievements was perhaps coming from a place of lower self-esteem, where one constantly needed to validate one’s awesome life in front of an audience. I am guilty of doing the same at some point too. The yearly memories on Facebook make me cringe when I look back at what I used to write three or four years ago. Looking at others doing it made it more obvious. I unfollowed a 100-odd people who wrote the most toxic posts. However, it still wasn’t making me feel better.

What I did right?

One day, I woke up and knew exactly what I was doing wrong. I finally found the right way of culling through the clutter. Instead of unfollowing people who wrote toxic things and keeping the rest, I decided to do just the opposite. I unfollowed everyone by default, only keeping those whose posts I really cared about, posts that "sparked joy" like Marie Kondo writes in her book. Instead of making this a process of elimination, I made it a process of selection. And that changed everything. I started to unfollow people unapologetically, even my close friends, and soon, more than 90% of the people were gone. But I did not stop at that. I “unliked” most photography pages, food blog websites, and other random local community pages like “Durga Puja in the USA”, “Tulip festival in Seattle” and “Bengalis abroad.” Now, I only get updates from some 50-odd people I really care about, and a handful of other websites such as the HONY, NPR, Brain Pickings, TED, and Upworthy. Individually unfollowing some 750 people was hard, but a little bit of Googling helped. Looks like Facebook has a feature where you can mass unfollow people.

How did that change things?

Now, I don’t have to start my day scrolling through anniversary pictures, birthday cake recipes, silly kid videos, and restaurant and movie check-ins. What I read doesn’t elevate my blood pressure. I don’t have to be a shuttlecock in heated arguments and discussions. Power to you for hiking Peru on your wedding anniversary and taking 4,000 odd pictures, but I don’t have to be forced into looking at them now when I have a paper deadline in two days. It doesn’t mean I do not care for you or do not wish you well. It just means that I choose not to know every little detail going on in your life.

Since we act as mirrors to the society around us, my own posting on Facebook has also gone down. I don’t feel a compelling need to share everything I read that inspires me. I go to bed on time and get my full 7-8 hours of sleep (there is only so much scrolling one can do). I am reading more books. I am watching more interesting videos and TED talks. I am reading more research papers on my areas of interest. I am beginning to think of new research ideas. I am looking for research collaborations in Asia. I have a lot to fill up my time meaningfully and even if I did not, I do not have to be a slave to your colorful and scintillating updates that sometimes borders around narcissistic posts of your travels or your child winning a handwriting competition. I can always follow you back someday or look you up if I feel the need to. But if you cannot keep me engaged in a good way, I do not need to engage in your life’s drama anymore.

Adopting the process of mass-unfollowing changed what I do with my time. Let me know if you have other time-tested creative ideas of disengaging from things that surround you but do not matter. 

sunshine

Signs of an NRI (and RI) Socialite

Disclaimer: The author shuns responsibility for any feelings of hurt this “Honesty 12.0 on a scale of 10” post may cause. All characters that have inspired this post are certainly not fictitious, although not all of them are known to the author personally. Any resemblance to anyone living or throwing Hangover-themed parties on their fiftieth birthday is purely so not coincidental. The author has documented her observations based on years of harrowing experience of living in the US and failing miserably to blend in with the nouveau riche NRI crowd. The entertainment their over-documented, cookie-cutter celebrity lives have provided the author so much inspiration that the author has renounced any contact whatsoever with the NRI community in Europe. Love them, hate them, unfollow them, but you cannot delete them. Although primarily meant for the NRI, the average Resident Indian (RI) has also started to show such symptoms, thanks to globalization. Here are some sure shot signs of an NRI/RI-socialite, documented without any prejudice or judgment (written in first person for special effects).

1. The more pregnant we are, the filmier our lives get. By the time it gets to the pregnancy photo shoot, replete with Surf-Excel-washed flowing white clothes, pink/blue props (how innovative!), sugary-gooey loving expressions, and close up shots of sixteen different positions of the man kissing the baby bump (that is more of a hillock by now) and making heart signs with jointed fingers, you will be wallowing in self-pity, looking at your own not-so-colorful life and frantically Googling, “How to look amazing despite greying hair, hormonal earthquakes, and PMS”.

2. For someone who attends five weekend parties on an average, you will never see us wearing the same designer clothes or accessories twice. The 90-day return policies of the stores certainly help.

3. We call our close friends "girlfriend", "babe", and "bestie" on Facebook. And a bitch behind their Faceback.

Corollary: Behind every happy groupfie taken with or without a stick is a bunch of dysfunctional friendship stories gone awry due to petty jealousy.

4. The man we are standing next to, and most of the time intimately, or even being lifted up in their arms, is not our husband. In fact most of the time, the husband is the photographer, or a distant spectator.

5. We might originally hail from Kochi, Ernakulum, or Muzaffarnagar. But our children have the names of Roman Gods and Greek Goddesses. A far cry from the Hemlata, Indumati, Agniveena, or even the Nisha, Pooja, and Neha.

Nama Sutra: The art of giving our children never-heard-before names. Take a mixer. Pour plenty of Hindi alphabets you learnt in the first grade. Blend well, until they mix thoroughly. Pick up two or three alphabets at random, and combine them in any random order, creating names like Napa, Resa, Saga, Roti, Kapda. Remember, if the name makes people go scratching their heads because they have never heard it before, it is Roman and Greek enough.

6. You have never seen us without makeup. Even our family has never seen us without makeup. Go check out the makeup groups where we dedicatedly post too-close-for-comfort close-ups of our faces, giving detailed step-by-step accounts of the makeup products we used in different quadrants of our face. Talking of effort, your entire effort of writing that goddamn dissertation that you mistakenly thought would pull you out of your pitiful existence would be put to shame.

7. Our predictable display of affection for other friends is very entertaining. Most of the time, we Like and comment on the same set of people’s updates. We root for brand names, not (writing) products. The comments typically look like this:

We: “Love your dress. Your nail polish. Your shoes. Your sense of style. Your blah blah blah.”

Them: “Thank you. You inspire me. XOXOXOXO.”

We: “You inspire me too. Muaaah.” 

Did you know that the number of Likes and comments are a direct function of a person’s popularity, and hence, should not be underestimated? We sometimes ask people offline how our Facebook picture is, and nudge them to Like or leave a comment, or paste their personal email/chat messages on our cake-cutting birthday pictures. We often ask people to "show some love”, because it is not love if it does not show.

8. Akhaade-Mein-Pehelwaan, or AMP alert: We will diligently tell you about every effort we made to get a finely chiseled and sculpted body, making you look at your six pack of (fl)abs and want to die out of shame.

"My breakfast was 50 push ups, 50 pull ups, 50 deadlifts, and 50 Surya Namaskars. For main course, did yoga and Zumba. For dessert, held a buffalo for five minutes to build bicep strength. Loved getting hot and sweaty. Now, time for chocolate pastries." (Hashtag: Loveyourbody, hardcorehotness). To which, rain comments like, "Love your dedication. What an inspiration!"

N.B.: We never ate that chocolate pastry. That was just to distract you, and make you crave for desserts.

9. Our moms and dads are also on Facebook, and usually comment on our funnily scandalous pictures with Alok-Nathish-sanskaari comments like, "God bless you beta.", or, “You are our baby doll.” (Parents, do you know what a baby doll really means?). In case of pictures from trips to exotic islands, our parents mostly write Tagore quotes in pure Bangla in the comments section that no one else understands.

10. We usually comment on other friends' pictures, writing things like, "hawwt momma", and "yummy momma" (although they are neither our mom, nor hot; far from it). Imagine your average Mashima from Midnapore, calling your Mom “Garam Ma” or “Swadisht Ma”. Yeah, I know. When said in English, even the most inappropriate of terms sound sassy and cool.

11. For your birthdays, you visit the local deity and the restaurant to celebrate with friends and family. If the birthday is the 50th one, you hide in your basement. When we turn 50, we fly to Vegas with a bunch of friends, ride limousines, drink champagne, gamble, throw themed costume parties, and wear identical tee-shirts with identical slogans to show solidarity.

12. Chin up. Hands on hips. Turn body to a 45 degree slant. These are not confidence-boosting mantras, but posing tricks that can effectively take care of the double chin, the hanging biceps, and the sagging tummy, respectively. And talking about pictures, if there aren’t any close up pictures of every food item, including the chips and the soda, the party was as good as having never happened at all.

13. Date nights occur more frequently than trips to the grocery store, post office, or bank in our household.  

14. One of the epic lines in my favorite movie When Harry Met Sally is when Harry tells Sally, “It is so nice when you can sit with someone and not have to talk.” That’s why every vital conversation with the partner, from when we will be home to how much we love one another, and even wishing each other Happy Birthday and Happy Anniversary is made on Facebook.

15. Significant, coolness-enhancing, once-in-a-lifetime events like road trips need special, live updates. Crossed a field. Saw a tree. Stopped by the gas station and took a selfie. Ate roti and achaar while watching the sunset. You get the picture.

16. If a new child arrives without preamble, a maternity photo shoot, an elaborate baby shower, periodic documentation of every emotional crest and trough mapped on the pregnancy curve, or live updates from the hospital, the new child is probably a puppy, kitty, or a new car.

Lastly, you see our pictures from five years ago, and we look like totally normal people.

sunshine

If Einstein was on Facebook…..

Graduate school is hard. Cold and colorless. Most often sleepless. Penniless as well. Whoever thought one should take all those 20 odd courses in order to survive graduate school. Then there is actual research involved. There is TAing, and grading. You need to publish, network, acquire academic currency (as papers), and be in the good books of your advisor. The advisor is always pushing you, making you work harder, never approving of or appreciating your potential. So what if he is paying you to get an education? If PhD was that easy or fancy, everyone would be getting one. It is certainly not that easy to have a smooth ride of a PhD. Not when so many other distractions are involved.

You see, the single most distracting factor is called Facebook (there are many others, I assure you). You wake up every good morning with good intentions of doing some path breaking, jaw dropping research. But, what goes with your morning cup of coffee is the compulsive need to look at the tiny red button that tells you the number of comments and messages you have on Facebook. I would not be writing this post if things stopped there. Between classes and meetings, there is this compulsive need to stay abreast of what is happening in other people’s lives. We “comment” on pictures where we are not to be found, “like” status messages from friends that have no significance to us whatsoever, “join” communities on “How to train your adviser” or “PhD sucks”, “poke” people we would never talk to in parties, and constantly check not just the comments of others made to others, but the comments to the comments that others made on a post where we commented. The professor who claimed you were bad with numbers was crazy. For some inexplicable reason, you cannot remember the principles of matrices or determinants you learnt in your last class, but clearly remembered the number of comments and likes your recent update on “I am going to have an awesome time in Yellowstone next weekend” garnered. There is this constant need to update status messages multiple times a day, to check updates from others, to post albums every now and then giving others a glimpse of your awesome life, and deriving narcissistic pleasure by updating the world on the minutest detail like “Worked out at the gym for 2 hours” (who cares?), or “my baby loved eating strawberries today, yumm yumm !!” (20 out of 25 comments for this post would be “awwwwww”). You suddenly know of everything and everyone, the Bangla aaNtel kobita that man you met just once writes (which you hardly understand), that friend of a friend’s friend you don’t know, but still stalk on Facebook, or the menu and guest list of the last potluck party you missed, whose pictures were just posted.

Things do not stop on Facebook. There are the blogs you read everyday, comment, and comment to the comment the previous commentator makes. You read news, you read other people’s secrets on Postsecret (to be fair, I do it only on Sundays). There is this compulsive need to check weather, not just where you live, but in some remote place like Ullhasnagar you might visit in future someday. There is random browsing on Craigslist, Amazon, and Yelp. You need to know of every possible deal in the city. You are still debating whether to cast a wider net on Google Plus and Twitter. Linkedin is constantly sending you updates about the people you recently added. Netflix is suggesting movies you should watch, based on the recent ratings you posted. There is a bunch of emails from stores and services you subscribed to. The local confectionary is giving away free cookies with purchases of $20 or more. There is this long email chain going on (45 emails and counting) about the upcoming Bijoya Sammelani potluck in 2 weeks, where the chicks are discussing what color of sarees they should wear, and if they should be color coordinated with their partners. And last, but not the least, the Google chat window is perennially open (who logs out of Gmail?), you constantly eyeballing who is online and who is busy, in the hopes that someone as jobless as you are will be nice enough to say hi.

Now with the human brain having a definite (and certainly measurable) attention span and the capacity to bear a somewhat fixed amount of cognitive load, I don’t blame you that you cannot finish deadlines on time, hardly get the time to do class readings before class, are perennially sleep deprived and grumpy, just asked for a project extension, and have started to question if getting a PhD is a waste of your youth after all. I am totally empathetic, being guilty of the same follies myself (everything that was written as “you” so far referred to “me”). You see, if Newton was sitting under the apple tree with his laptop, gravitation would never be discovered. Instead of thinking about what just happened, he would get busy updating Facebook, “An apple fell on my head, that’s a bad apple !!!” (a comment that would garner him 45 likes and 30 comments about the best cider places in town and the current recruitment policies of Apple). Imagine how Einstein’s life would be if he was Facebooking and Netflixing from his lab in Princeton. No wonder graduate school is hard these days, and advisers just do not understand.

sunshine

Gone with the wind ??

I’m not depressed or suffering. I haven’t gained weight in the last few months (in fact I have lost some). The Europe trip is still on. Overall, everything is going great (well, kinda). Yet I had an unusually morbid thought today.

What would happen to my blog if I died?

Now the little bit of money and belongings I have can go to my family. I’d be sad to part with my car, but remember, I am dead, so theoretically I couldn’t be feeling sad. Anyone wanting to claim my wardrobe, books, and other stuff is welcome. But what happens to my blog?

Does it vanish after a while? Does it become a ghost blog? Does it stay for people to read in future? Does it become a nationally preserved historic site? Since most of my blog readers wouldn’t know I am dead, would Google make an official announcement on my blog that I am dead, and people shouldn’t expect posts in future? Now my blog has comment moderation, meaning any comment posted has to get approved by me first. So even if someone makes an announcement of my death, or posts a “May your soul RIP sunshine. We are glad there will not be any meaningless posts in future” comment, who is going to publish the comment? What exactly will happen to my blog when I am dead?

Now the future of my blog shouldn’t really matter to me once I am dead. But while I am alive, I think it does matter. Like I can decide the fate of my materialistic belongings, I would like to decide the fate of my blog, something I started and have nurtured for years. What I do about it or how I do it, I don’t really know.

Your thoughts?

sunshine

Face(book)ing Dilemma

I joined Facebook (FB) with the hope that the more the number of friends I connect to, the happier I’d be. I couldn’t be more wrong. The more the number of friends I connect to, the unhappier I am. Reason? You tell me why.

The world of FB is somewhat surreal and far removed from reality. It is like the “Golden Age” during Shakespearan times when everything was hunky dory, women had the perfect figure even when gyms didn’t exist, the economy of a country didn’t look as emaciated as it does today (ironically in the land of hopes and promises), children finished their homework on time and didn’t fuss over food, the “Shylockian” airline industry didn’t make you pay for every pound of luggage you carried, and the husband was not a survivor of the wife’s PMS depression multiple times a month. However in the real world, flab tires show from the most embarrasing places no matter how much you discipline your taste buds, dignified women like me have occasional thoughts about marrying a man for his riches and a green card (and the baldness, wrinkles, and lack of youth that comes with it) as a desperate measure of coping with unemployment, the airline industry messes up your baggage during the honeymoon, you as a man are denied sex because you delayed throwing the trash by two days, and Baba Ravi, Ram, Contentmentnanda (a hypothetical name for all the yogi yoga-babas who create miracles) make deep holes in your pocket, charging you hundreds of dollars, only to ask you to control your breathing, keep expectations low, and adopt pain and suffering as a means of happiness in life.

I firmly believe that the photo updates and the status updates on FB are a skewed misrepresentation of actual life, broadcasting and showcasing the best while your real life maybe far from even better than what it was 10 years ago. I see this friend’s picture in a new year party, looking stunningly beautiful in a red dress, all drunk and happy, surrounded by dudes and chicks, making me envy her socializing skills. I see the status update of my friend change from “single” to “engaged” and “married” and fume. Some of my friends have 700 + friends on FB. I don’t even think I know that many people in real life. Come December, I suffer from immense psychological pressure and chronic depression from the sheer update of the wedding pics or the anniversary pics, a sad reminder of something I must do too because even before I know, I will be menopausal and saying bye bye to my youth. I see these friends of mine holding cute little babies out of a Johnson’s soap advertisement and wonder if genetics will play a role in making my baby look so cute. And then there are pictures of the guy at the convocation who recently finished his PhD and got a 120k job offer at the silicon valley. There are updates of couples honeymooning and parasailing in Hawaii, people buying million dollar homes, hugely prego women being pampered at baby showers, girls sitting on piles of empty gift boxes they claim to have received for Valentines Day, friends cooking the best of food, and people giggling and laughing and having fun.

Every one of these characters on FB seem so happy, content, gifted, well-toned, married, employed, and thrilled about life.

Everyone on FB also seem to know someone who is famous.

You suddenly realize with depressing alacrity that people around you are PhDs, graduating, working, gymming, marrying, procreating, buying homes, throwing house warming parties, taking scuba diving lessons, eating fish tandoori, taking their parents to visit the Grand Canyon, buying Audis, passing their exams with flying colors, getting into MIT, performing in dance shows, dressing up for Halloween parties, developing six packs, touring Europe, and starting companies.

This is surreal reality. People are putting up their best to show everything that is good while shoving the “not-so-good” parts of their life deep down. This is not a true representation of the people surrounding me. If it is, then something is very wrong with my stuck life where every little thing I want is achieved after great struggle.

sunshine

How Internet Made Me Homeless.

Forgive me if I seem to be babbling about my new home a tad too much. It is almost three times as spacious as my previous home, I have a roommate I am pally with, and the view outside the window is breathtaking. One look outside and all I see is the lush greenery, the bikers biking and the sports enthusiasts jogging. There is no insane noise of the traffic outside. Lots of storage space in every nook and corner of the house. What else could someone like me want?

Yet I have literally been homeless the last few days. To be specific, I do not go home at nights like good children do to cook a decent meal and then to go to bed watching a movie.

Instead, the walls of my lab in the department have been seeing me almost every night now.

I do not claim to be a great researcher, the next best thing on the earth after Einstein. No, I have not been burning the midnight oil either.

The reason is simple. Internet has not yet been set up at my new home !

Now this seemed absurd and ridiculous to my mom, whose voice was coated with the “What's going on? Are you crazy?” suspicion. Welcome to the US mom.

Even a few years ago in India, internet use was restricted to chatting with unknown people called “cool dude 2000” or “friendly hunk from Bombay”. Checking emails came next, but then again, so few people among friends and relatives were net savvy that there were not many people you could expect emails from. This was back in the early 2000s.

Then I was about to graduate, and internet saw a new use for me. I was applying to various schools in the US and soon I was browsing the websites of various institutes. The Google search engine seemed like a magic word for me then, and it was marvelous how putting a simple word like “recipe for chicken curry” got so many results. I remember I would often browse the website for the Indian Armed Forces, marveling at the men and women who made it there. But then, these needs could be easily fulfilled in a couple of hours in the evening, and that is what I usually did every alternate day on my way back from college. The nearest café “Cyber World” soon started to charge a whooping Rs.20/hour after he installed air conditioning. Thus I would walk two bus stops off the route to go to a café that charged Rs.10/hour for a membership, and did not boast of an air conditioner. The walls were damp, only one out of the seven computers had a webcam, and one would usually wait for 30 minutes during peak hours to find a place. We had a computer at home by that time. But it was strictly used for making word documents and excel spreadsheets. The floppy had seemed the only magic window as the link to the world of the internet then. For I would download information, save it on the floppy, and later watch it at home. Someone convinced my dad that getting an internet connection would only make the home computer prone to virus infections. Dad must have thought that it was a real virus and declared, No net at home! The chapter was closed.

Post-masters, I decided to apply to US schools. People who have been on the same track would know that it takes browsing all day on the net to select the schools and garner information till you finally dozed off on the computer. It is not that it is not doable in a cyber café, but it is so very convenient at home. It took me months of convincing dad that I would be browsing for information and not chatting with random “cool dude 2001”s (I was out of the habit of using Yahoo Messenger by that time anyway). He finally consented to take the internet connection at home.

But then again, mom would be very curious about what I did all day in front of the computer, squinting with a notebook on my lap. I was taking online GRE tutorials, finding information about the US schools I would apply to, finding online SOPs to take a look at, and so on. I don’t blame mommy for wondering how would people “in their times” make it to the US without the internet. Even I wondered that.

All this while, neither mom or dad were very net savvy. Dad would check emails and type replies very slowly, make spreadsheets, and that’s about it. Mom was even scared to start the computer.

When I came to the US, the internet life took a very different role. I had a university net id now and I was soon to realize that it was no fancy stuff to mail others in India from and get them wondering- “Wow, you have a net id that says something something dot edu”. My friends from IIT had those ids, and I had been jealous !

Anyway, here people use the internet as a substitute for telephones or personal meetings. Appointments are fixed and rescheduled, profs inform us about classes and their office hours, and every conversation possible happens through the official emails. People sitting side by side would be emailing each other about the orientation dinner they were going to. And it made sense in a way because that way there were records of all the conversations. We did everything online now, saw timetables and course websites, sent emails, browsed text books and e journals, booked air flights, bought laptops and mp3 players, ordered stuff, borrowed books and DVDs from the library, booked library rooms for group discussions, etc. Everything you could think of was being done online.

I was calling less frequently and emailing my folks more. I was sending my pics. I was chatting with them using Gtalk (by this time, my mom had transformed herself to a super mom who could start the computer and do simple stuff like send emails or connect to the webcam on messenger). I was showing my folks my home using the webcam. She would see the new dress I bought or the new drapes I had picked at a garage sale. Everything was being done online now.

Sometimes I wonder if research could be possible without the net. I was looking for papers, corresponding with the profs, digging up data and statistics, all with a click. Unlike 5 years ago when emails were checked once in seven days, I was checking emails once in 10 minutes. BBQ party, what to wear? Come and pick me at 8:30. Get some pineapple ice cream with you. All these one-line instructions were being sent through emails checked in between work. No, I would not say it was being checked in between work in a hushed hushed way, away from the glances of others. Checking emails and replying to them was a part of work now.

When I shifted to my new home, I almost suffered from acute depression the one day I spent without the internet. The internet guy would not be available to set up things for the next 7 days now. Seven days without uninterrupted internet? Enough.

Every night after dinner, I pack my bags, toothbrush and all, and come to the department. I browse through the internet for as long as I can, the earphones plugged in my ears while I happily listen to music. Sometimes when I am in no mood for work, I YouTube. Watch a movie. Read blogs. Write blogs. If nothing works, I read scraps. And then I sleep on the couch in the department. If I crave for some caffeine at the middle of work, I go get myself a coke or a bar of chocolate from the wending machine. And while I walk through the empty corridors at night, my hands thrust in my pockets, my footsteps echoing, I tell myself- Wow, it is cool to be a grad student here. There are no safety issues as long as you are inside the building. You have the wending machine. You have the couch. You have the microwave to heat up stuff. And most importantly, you have the internet.

Unless you had a loved one waiting at home, why would you want to go home?

sunshine.

Orkut- Bringing Lost Ones Together.

Orkut has had a profound impact on everyone’s life, and this is clear from the amount of writing I do about it. Orkut got me back in touch with many of my school mates. These are not the friends I had last met during the board exams. These are my friends from the nursery to the pre-puberty era before I had changed cities. Got hold of one, and got hold of most of the others through him.

The first thing that came as a shock to me is the way they look now. The boys are men, and the girls are women. Even their baby brothers and sisters who were in kindergarten are young men and women now. Browsing through the pics in their albums is a journey down the memory lane. 13 years of no contact, and I suddenly see that though their faces look still the same, they have grown mustaches and beards, and are taller and broader now. It feels strange to see so many girls married and with their babies the size of what I must have seen them first. And this brings back hilarious memories back from my kindergarten days. For I have seen these prim and proper men and women 23 years back, their noses running and hair oily while they cried the whole day. I even remember what their moms and dads looked like. There was this guy from my first standard who was so prone to skin disease that no one would want to sit near him. Yet I saw his recent pic, all brawny and on a bike, with his status “committed” (I wonder if he still has bad skin). There was this topper from my class who was all lanky a good 4” shorter than I was. Yet he is a 6’2” tall, muscular man now. When I talked to him over the telephone after so many years, I was so thrilled to hear his deep husky voice, a far cry from his girly voice in school. 

The guy who was first caught writing a love letter to some heartthrob in the fifth grade is a married man now. The guy whose dad would drop him in a rusty Luna drives a car now. Most of them are either in Bangalore or in the US. Most women are married now (a further reminder of my misspent youth, ha ha) with kids, while men are no exception. I have seen these people crying, fighting, making a queue while going to the restroom, peeing in their pants, cheating in the exams, standing on the bench or kneeling down with hands crossed around their ears, digging their noses, wearing half trousers, pinching and boxing others, eating their food in an uncouth, messy way, flinging chalk pieces and paper rockets at others, getting their ears boxed by the teachers, writing horribly funny answers in the exams that the teacher would later read out, and failing and repeating classes. It is so surprising that even after so many years, I remember their handwritings vividly, and so many incidents otherwise eventually forgotten. I am amazed at the sheer number of details these guys remember of me. During conversations, horror stories of our teachers often come up. “Remember the dance teacher who used to target everyone’s butt with that long, thin cane of his?” “Remember the language teacher who used to scream?” “Remember the teacher from class 1 who used to box everyone’s ears?” I still remember the signatures of most of the teachers, and how delighted we would be to earn “good” and “excellent” remarks from them. Most of the teachers have retired or have shifted elsewhere now. Some local friends even say that the school building has been remodeled, repainted, and looks nothing like what it used to then. But for me, it is still the same school, the same teachers who are a decade and a half older than what I remember of them, and my friends in half trousers and frilly frocks. It is amazing how I remember different people for different reasons. A certain guy used to wear a red sweater that had two holes on the right side. A certain guy would always have a running nose. A certain guy would always sleep in class. A certain girl had lice-infested hair. A certain guy always wrote his name in reverse, reminding me of ohm and mho. Strangely, I have their images in my mind still wearing the school uniform and the house badges.

The guy who had failed in math runs his business now. I wonder if he would find it weird when I met him. For we know these little secrets of each other, like who had bitched about whom, who had called whom a donkey, and who had pinched whom. My friend was so surprised when I told him that I remembered him bringing samosa and sweets for tiffin everyday from Calcutta Sweets, which he would eventually feed the crows during the lunch breaks. Even he did not remember that.

Well, such is the journey down the memory lane, and the bouts of nostalgia. For a moment I close my eyes and I can see those same faces, the same classrooms, the same teachers, the same books and the same chapters, and the same commotion in school. And then I open my eyes and everyone is grown up, scattered, leading their own lives in different parts of the world. And I keep wondering that like me, do they ever think of the bygone days, the fun and frolic, the naughtiness and the fun of being a kid in school?

sunshine.

Truncated Love.

Hi

Wazzup

Hr u?

Gr8 gr8.

U liked the buk?

ROTFLMAO

temme

Gud

I lv u

Me2

I lv u 1/0

k. gtg. Brb.

Wtf?

lol. ttyl. Gtg.

k. tc.

U2.

Now that is what I call the expression of love in codes. Anybody care for full sentences, correct spelling and proper grammar?

Gtg.
-
sunshine.