It has been 3 days since the dawn of the brand new year 2011. Like all days here i was sitting on my beloved system, 1 AM in the morning trying to wait for the time to make me drowsy enough to push myself onto the bed. Saying "Suddenly my eyes fell on....." would sound like a total cliche so i am gonna try and tackle this a tad bit differently.
So as i was staring at my screen trying to decide what to do to burn myself out i noticed something odd about my G-talk Messenger. One of my friends had updated their one liner with a link to a new blog she created a while back and as my curiosity got the best of me( it always does..) i decided to sniff around. Now before i move along lets rewind a bit(right..) and take a close look at the smoldering virtual history i share with an obsession of mine...the Internet.
Yes...when i said "Smoldering" i meant the word. Mostly because my affair with the internet is blanketed in the fog of "unknown and unpredictable activities". Well, before the curiosity of the reader gets the better of him/her let me break it down a bit. I live in the small city of Chandigarh which virtually is ....well no offense intended to any other city dwellers who might read this but this place is so dull and quiet it can qualify for a retreat or a spa for the retired. The reason i say so is simply the fact the even though we live roughly just 4 to 6 hours away from India's capital the difference in technology and most other stuff is VAST and yes vast is the operative word here. And i don't wanna touch the Southern part of the country cause then this article will become something of a turf propaganda and thats the least of my intent. Long story short i live in a lazy ass, laid back , technophobe, bureaucratic, red-tape clad city in contrast to my needs and aspirations. The things i am interested in as hobby or passion is vastly different from an ideal Chandigarhian youth. If a ratio had to be penned down..i would say i am a part of 5 to 10 % local youth group that have peculiar taste in life contrary to the place they hail from and i swear to you and i am seriously not kidding around, if it weren't for MasterCards and E-bay i would be knitting a carrying case for my External Hard Drive. Yep ladies and gentlemen...i live in a place where it is easier to get laid than to get solid hardware or speedy net services just because what i want isint the trend of the local populace. Its like the Gods hate me for the time being for some reason and that time has been going on for 25 years now. Driving back to the point at hand i live my life with the "make-do" attitude and whatever i can do with my crappy yet reliable internet i do it in the pursuit of a better tomorrow...or day after tomorrow...or day after the after tomorro.... ehh you can imagine what i mean.
As i mentioned, unpredictable and unknown activities. Well as they say if you don't get it by hook, you employ Captain Crook. Rather than going into details much lets just say what life doesn't give me legally i resort to ...ahem... "special" ways to obtain them. Needless to say i touch horrendous Data usage digits on my Internet account and my ISP looks at me baffled. But hey what goes around comes around. If i cant buy it, its because of the " Oh-i-am-satisfied-with-what-little-i-have"mentality of the people around me and the corporations banking on that very notion. If you gonna make money one way..i gotta make another corporation loose it the other way just cause the balance is tipped intentionally and its just screwing me personally. Not my fault if they think plying 5000 cars a month on narrow city roads with retarded drivers behind the wheel is "Progress" but providing the real "broadband" with some decent speeds is a wasted effort.
Putting Emo anger aside...i have been on the Internet highway for almost 6 years now and belive me i practically saw the birth of broadband in this country. I started off from a Dial Up Sify moving on to BSNL changing to TATA Indicom and sliding to Connect Broadband. I played online games like Ragnarok and World Of Warcraft and in that course of time i searched every nook and corner of my brain for more content i could apply on the internet. Even though the experience i had with these ISPz was so full of crap i still got hooked on to the virtual world pretty fast and soon i realized it was almost impossible to function without it and soon realized it was my professional calling. Thanks to a bit of loving yet stern push from Mom and some encouragement of a " good friend" , i dedicated my life to the world of Networking.
Yet all those years on the internet...there was one thing that still couldn't reel me in...the social networking. I started off trying my hand on Yahoo messenger slyly trying to impress the chick sitting 3 cubicals away from me(please don't ask me how i got her Messenger ID, i am not proud of how i got it myself ). Anyways Nineteen year old kid with weird interests and hobbies dont exactly pass for "Internet Playboy" and needless to say my Virginish charms botched most, if not all, of the attempts i made. Over the course of time i went on to try MSN and still i was hitting dead ends with almost every kind of relationship i was looking for. Friends, romance, hobbyists even co-players from the online games..you name it and i was crashing and burning trying to maintain a social link with anyone. In the end i knew this game wasn't meant for me even though millions on this blue planet where pulling it off.
Then i literally got dragged into another kind of Social interaction. The kind where u make friends on a website and leave little cute messages. Now before you let Orkut or Facebook flood your imagination let me cut you right there and introduce you the the archaic "Friendster". Yep and thats not the original concept at all but its quite old and pretty outdated now. In order to try something new i decided to play along. Pros of the concept was you get a lot of friends but the Con of the concept? You get a LOT of a friends. Something about me i hate is that when i get bored of one thing its just impossible for me to allot my concentration or attention to the particular subject anymore. As i got bored by the website i started severing my strings unintentionally with the "friends" i had made and by the time i realized it, it was too late. Whenever i messaged someone old they would either wont bother replying or just make /wrist signs. After much "repair efforts" i called it off and wrote the whole thing as a lost cause.
Two years back i stumbled upon a very small and basic Messenger called G-Talk. It did the basic things very efficiently. It kept you connected with your friends. The interface was pretty plain yet not boring. No emoticons but you could set an avatar still. Even to this day its my only messenger. Slowly i ditched my yahoo and msn accounts too and made GMail my virtual home. Time passed by and for some odd reason that now escapes me i jumped on to Facebook though i managed to dodge the Twitter and Orkut bug completely. But i still should say i was pretty late to the party ,(my friends had already been poking each other for over an year or so and i was still trying to get familiar with the website), I guess reason would be i really didnt wanna go. Its was like dragging geeks to a jock party and that cake dont bake smoothly. As it would have had happened eventually, even though i had fun playing those little Flash player games serving food to weird looking customers the monotony got to me faster than a cur that chases down a rag-picker down the street. Even now i have a love and hate relationship with that website. I go there from time to time but just to pass the time with weird quizzes. I was pretty sure up until today that socializing online is not my game...and then i stumbled here.
I have been here before. I am a frequent visitor of another acquaintance of mine that hosts a blog here but never did i harbor a notion of having my own blog because...well honestly i have been so engulfed in my own schedule, i guess i never gave any serious thought to actually imagine having my own page to write and put it out there. Two things i learned from my academic past. One that having loads of friendships don't buy you real friend and second that when i started writing i couldn't stop. Its like my Intellectual Automobile came without a brake as stock feature. I guess the simplicity of this blog and my inability to stop until i have expressed myself finally, no matter how off-topic i went, reeled me in . Even though i am not sure how long i would be able to keep doing this since my boredom level is pretty unpredictable...still if i can pen my thoughts and just immortalize it on the net pretending to have an alter virtual ego that is reading me, i doubt it will be so bad no matter how corny it sounds. Heck i am not even sure if anyone will ever read this long ass, well hell i don't know...SOMETHING, apart from me but still the fact remains...i wanted to write it and in my book the effort of baring it all(figuratively off course) that's what matters. Guess its the quest to find a place for semblance..a place for closure...a place for a Figment Of A Doughty Bastion for the mind..
