My Friends on Orkut

The final nail in the coffin came when another email landed up in my mailbox. That was still the time I wasn't too sure of my way around Google mail and the SPAM filters they had in place refused to regard this as junk email. I thought it was junk, though, especially because I didn't know what this whole thing was. There was a time when I was getting more invites to Orkut than emails that I needed to read and respond to. So I decided to put an end to the agony and sign up for Orkut.

It so happened that Orkut had already set an account aside for me. They kind of knew I was coming. It was a little scary, because their confidence in my taking the bait was in some sense testimony to their bait's effectiveness. It felt somewhat like the fly-trap, where the instrument knew the insect was coming and always got one over the insect because of this knowledge. I was even more scared because it turned out that my Google account username and password worked on this website too. Of course, I am one of those semi-paranoid people who believe that the world is out to get them (not always, but I have those moments) and this was a tad disconcerting. Why on Earth should Orkut know that I am the same person who has an email account with Google, an account that receives more SPAM than useful email?

Torn between shutting the browser tab and continuing to get invites, I decided that letting Orkut into my little, embarrassing secret was the lesser of the two evils. I logged in, into a page where approximately thirty friend requests were waiting for me. Now thirty was not the number of friend requests that had found their way into my inbox. I guess these thirty people were really desperate to be friends since the only thing that explained those swarms of invites was that they had been sent repeatedly.

However, there was something interesting about the composition of those smiling faces and celebrity pictures staring at me against the disturbingly blue background. Most of them were people I hadn't been in touch with in a really long time. Most of them were people from school I had lost touch with, a few of them were from people in college I had lost touch with after my first year there, and some of them were from people I was still in the process of knowing. No one I knew and was really good friends with was there in the list. And to think they had bombarded me with invites! I felt so special. It felt like I mattered to these people even when we had lost touch! I felt that probably there was more to the thread that bound us than had been apparent to me, more to that thread than the coincidence of being coevals in an institute!

And so began my tenure on Orkut. I actively involved myself in searching for people I knew. My "Network" grew. And soon I realized that I had entered a competition of sorts. I, the four day old baby on Orkut, was competing with "friends" two weeks old on the number of friends we had in our lists. My list was growing at an alarmingly fast rate, I was told. It wasn't something I had kept a tab on, but just because someone pointed it out, I began to notice it. And I felt cool about it for a while, till one day, I could think of no one else who I knew and who I didn't have on my Orkut list. And I had only about two hundred people there. And that was the bursting of my bubble. It was a realization that would have never occurred if I hadn't actually tried to list down all my acquaintances in the manner that Orkut tempted me to do. I just realized that I had spent 22 years of my life, and the total number of acquaintances that I could think of was just about two hundred. The saving grace, if any, was that these people still considered me important enough to really want me on this forum so that they could keep in touch with me.

I slowly got more familiar with Orkut. I began to notice things that I had never noticed earlier. I noticed little hearts and ice cubes and smiley faces at the top of the page and I didn't know what they were. Later, I found out that they were indications of how "trusty" (whatever that is), cool and sexy people thought you were. I wasn't doing too well on that one. There was a number next to the ice cubes, which, as the programmers later specified, was the number of scraps that people had left you.

In about a week I realized that people compete about the number of scraps they have; there were congratulatory posts on scrapbooks for completing one thousand scraps and suck like.

It took me another week to realize that most birthday wishes on Orkut come from a birthday reminder service that Orkut has.

In a few more days that realized that friendship requests sent to you are resent automatically by Orkut, should you ignore the first one and let it expire. So much for my gloating over my importance to people.

With my growing disillusionment with the greatness of Orkut as a medium of communication between long lost people, I began to get critical about the scraps that people would leave me. I began to dislike the convenience that it offered. It is so much more convenient to write a single line of hello than to write an email, because writing an email requires a certain mental effort. It requires recalling what level one interacted with someone on, it requires one to recall one's impressions of a person, it requires one to decide what one wants to share with a person. And most importantly, it requires an external stimulus that is more substantial than a picture thrown up randomly from a computer database for the actual act of emailing, or calling by phone, to take place. On Orkut, however, you don't need any of the above.

And this convenience is the root of my antagonism towards Orkut. I never know if someone asked me how I was doing because they thought of me because of something or just because I happened to figure in a little window containing a few random friends from their lists. I don't particularly enjoy one line scraps like "Hey Dude! What’s up?" with their one line responses "Not much dude! What’s up with you?" because it’s almost like saying "how do you do" when you don't want to hear about someone's stomach ache.

And for all of my misgivings, I still log into Orkut, faithfully, once a week at least, to see what scraps people have left me, I still update my profile every now and then and post pictures when emailing them becomes too much of an effort and I still search every now and then for people I think of to see if I can add them to my network. I do all of this while simultaneously ruing the superficiality of my social interactions. Well, at least it keeps the SPAM out of my inbox.

Mr J Christ

Exams leave me in a strange frame of mind, and I am usually not aware of the metamorphosis till the transition is complete. My realization of this transition, hence, is usually stark. Yesterday, while trying to sleep two hours before my usual bed-time at 2:00 am , drifting between the delirium induced by an effort to sleep when not sleepy, and thoughts of getting up and doing some reading, I dozed off into a small nap. I don't think I slept for more than 15 minutes, but I realized that exams were here when I woke up, because I usually do not have such senseless dreams.

I have a friend who lives in Bethlehem, a place near New Jersey. I dreamt of the following conversation:

"Where do you come from?"

"I live in Bethlehem. You know where that is?"

"Yeah..thats where J Christ comes from. That guy with the huge fan following? His biography, whatsitsname, yeah the Bible! Its been on the bestseller's list since like the Renaissance. Apparently that is when they made the first printing presses because the folks couldn't get enough of him and they wanted more. I heard that Britanny Spears got so jealous of his popularity that she got breast implants."

"Britanny Spears has breast implants?"

"Dunno, never seen them. So where exactly is this Bethlehem place?"

"Somewhere in New Jersey."

"They have a New Jersey in Israel?"

"Chinmaya, New Jersey is in USA."

"No wait, I don't get this. JC was born in Bethlehem. Then Herod sent his lackeys to hunt him down. You mean those Romans came all the way to USA? Wasn't Columbus the first to discover the Americas? Or was he before Herod? No way man...there was a gap between them, I am sure."

"Yes there was. There are two different Bethlehems. One in Israel, where all the things with Herod happened, and there is another in NJ, USA."

"What is with naming places after places? I mean I found it funny enough that there is a Delhi in New York, and now you are telling me that there is a Bethlehem in New Jersey! Recently I found out there is a Lucknow in Ontario. And that there is a Hyderabad in Pakistan. Cashmere is a city in Washington. There is a Cashmere in New Zealand. Next you'll be telling me there is a New Zealand in Ohio or something. Hey! Are you even listening to me...?"

This is around where I woke up.