Mar 11, 2010

When technology wins over geography :)

He was smart. funny. and cute
Maybe ( Hopefully)He thought the same about about me.
We would chat for hours.
and then one day he 'asked me out'. I didn't know what to say.
He was watching me. Every reaction of mine.
Oh the pressure. I felt his gaze following every twitch of my lips, movement of my eyes, shake of my hands
But before I could say a word,
damn the broadband guys! Disconnect!!

Is this a familiar scene? Deja vu?

This was my first online crush. We'd just got a internet connection on our humble Hp desktop computer ( what we call granddad computers now) and I was hooked from the word go! i mean how cool was it to be enter a room full of random ppl from all over the world making up cool names like "demonica30" and go berserk chatting lYk DiZz ! Chat rooms, communities, random discussions forums , emails, or just meeting people in real time-live and following up online- etc you name it . Have done it all and at every stage found people across a screen and behind a keyboard that would begin to mean a big part of life.

I don't know if i remember when that exact moment was when my "Online" life somewhat took precedence over my 'real' life or whether I even realize a difference between the two. I find myself withdrawing from "real' situations and slinking into the safe haven of being "online". I catch myself- almost with guilt- when surrounded with people having 'real' interactions, to check if i got a new mail or a msg on my phone. Before my family knows what's on my mind ( if they ever do), the hundreds of people on my friends list on social networking site would. My family may still not have discovered the writer in me, but i know there're many, unknown people out there, who i dont know, they dont know me, but they're reading what ive typed and holding on to my words, perhaps quoting me. While Im going about my 9-5 job there's another browser open with full of windows that blink orange and green and suddenly in the middle of an important project, meeting, i let out a loud guffaw over a quip my friend on the other end of the screen would've said, unmindful of the amused stares of the 'actual ' people around me. !
my gtalk windows blinks orange and pop comes the message from my cubicle mate who sits precisely 13 cms away from me! She needs some water! at the same time I'm watching a friend from the US show me some new stuff that he shopped for and I'm chiding about how yellow is so not his colour !

How irrelevant have distances become? or rather how advanced has connectivity become that it has stopped making a difference if someone- an experience, person or event needs to be , real, "flesh and blood" , be able to be touched and felt, to make an impact.
I don't know if I appreciate the fact that I spoke to my neighbor of 3 yrs on Orkut first or the fact that years back, much before technology entered our pockets and lives, we ( Friends n folks living in the same colony) used to give people calls on their landlines and cut the phone with a thud soon as someone other than the intended receiver picked up the phone -Esp if it happened to be opposite sex ! or as was the 'code' between me and my boyfriend( Yes i had one ) about the "different kind of whistles' that we'd composed that were to be used dependent on the urgency and purpose of the 'call' or throwing paper rockets with messages written on them !

If you're a person who's shifted as many cities as me, or even works/studies in a different city than where the folks are, the question of connection becomes even more important. Today I can't imagine being social without being online. I love the fact that I've found a girl I shared a seat with and ate chalk with in IV B on Facebook!

Not to take away from the actual experience of meeting someone, being able to hear each other talk,laugh, be impromptu and spontaneous, take joy in the 'moment' over a cup of chaai, but just that with the kind of technology our generation is blessed to see and own, with being able to be connected 24/7 through the net, our mobile phones, webcams, pics, how hard is it to be far apart geographically but feel a sense of amazing closeness that sometimes even people who're with you in person all day fail to let you feel. Also good to mention, how really easy it so for someone online, you probably have never even met to make you smile with just his words, a compliment or a realization that he knows you better in a few days that some of your real friends will ever do in a lifetime.

How else can you describe the much-debated feasibility /success of long-distance relationships which are not such an uncommon phenomenon these days thanks to globalization and the nomadic nature of people. So much so that being in the 'same city' maybe the last criterion of judgment of how good is a relationship,b/w two people who like each other on all other fronts be decided.

Excuse the rather juvenile analogy here, but don't you think the people you meet/keep in touch with online are like those stars up there in the sky, distant, sometimes inaccessible, but you can see them, bask in their light, and before you know it they are all over you, making your life a little brighter.

At the back of my mind I realize how less i know of my cubicle mate, who pinged me for water?

1 comment:

tropical seagull said...
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