O-pen R-esolve to K-ill U-seful T-ime - The social network saga

The fifteenth time I type my username and password, I feel real shaky. Some faint voice from my heart gets seriously chronic. I ignore it, if possible muffle it. I click on the link titled “3324 scraps” and see obscene things, like “hi da.”, “good morning dude.” etc. by this time any duffer must have figured that I am an orkut addict. (I hate to admit that.) I sip away the last traces of coffee in my mug and start keying reply meaasges. The new plugin in IE helps you reply without going to the recipient’s scrapbook(to make things worse!). the icicng on the cake is that I am sinning on a linux box. Something strikes me vaguely that linux and orkut don’t mix that well. And I’m probably not erring this time. Ion* calls me and tells me to drop by. It was like a welcome break from the tedium of constant orkutting. I slip in a dirty jeans and head to Ion’s. guess what? Ion has found a new soul mate in orkut, and he needs to assess the odds. And I was the scapegoat! He gives me a sneak peek of her pics, I get a thousand volt surge, and I can hardly sit because my pants are little bulgy now. The girl is real cool. She’s a northie from Bangalore or something. Basically christened Swagatha by her parents, she has radically altered her profile, personality and nomenclature to coax innocent souls like Ion and me. All it took was a few classic Photoshop plugins (need I say GIMP plugins cause I’m a Linux advocate) to get me on the raise. It sure worked. After several scraps of fooling around and plaudits, Ion decides to break the ice and call her for a date. It works out smooth, like the surface of a 125.Rs Table tennis ball. I am no way involved in the whole episode, maybe Ion wanted to pinch my sweet-n-single attitude by showing off his “look pal, I’m worth my salt” attitude. Definitely, the 4 months gym workouts were not in vain. So were the special snaps he posted on his profile to woo many other Swagathas around. Even stags had equal rights to Photoshop, which brings me to the basic question. What on the earth is happening in this website?

Internet is a medium where talking does the trick. Nothing else holds air. In short, You open your mouth and talk fantastic GRE grade English, people take it for granted that you are real smart. No wonder Eric has the slogan “shut up and show them the code.” Because a picture is worth a thousand words, folks at google decided to keep an album of 12 photos for each orkutter. Chicks make wonderful use of it. Many a time, I get fooled when I see 4 photos, click them to find out later that they aren’t hers, but snaps of scenery, flowers or her pet dog or cat. I was greedy enough to expect good eye candy instead(so was Ion!).

Secondly, its about the games people play. A few popular ones follow:

1)       give an apt caption for the photo above you.

2)       Would you date with the above person

3)       Tell a few words about the above person.

By “above guy” I mean the person who posted in the thread before you. Many of my friends wasted their otherwise productive time on such nonsense quite often. They justify it in the name of socializing (Ion excluded.).

Thirdly the communities folks join, which has no lateral meaning whatsoever. Most of them are void of any activity sans some Portuguese spam. I’ve had enough with English spam! In spite of so many short comings, why do people orkut, and why has it turned out to be a successful business model?

It has got everything to do with our psyche. You get sheer thrill when you are lauded. Ion used to tell me that it’s a wonderful feeling to love and be loved. Even though Ion represented but a small sample of the human population, he was “bullseye” right! It is human tendency to show off. Our musical ability, artisitcal skills, sense of humour and all sundry activities are a projection of our sexual motives. When I type in my orkut profile that I play better guitar than Bryan Adams in “summer of 69”, I am advertising my genes. The same function why peacocks show off their feathers. Orkut is a small fragment of human evolution, but a gaint leap in online social networks. One could argue that showing off could be done by other means as well, why orkut?

The answer is evident. Orkut is the easiest medium to show off. Its any fool’s “fifteen seconds of fame.” For instance, once I overindulged in publicity so much that one poor fella asked ME whether I was from IITs. This is a real life case study of how people get misguided oabout others’ personalities.Orkut catalyses your ego by a cool weapon in its arsenal, TESTIMONIALS. Or white lies, as I prefer to call them. For a good case study again, you can visit my profile and find out why! (If it doesn’t bother you, you can write me one, all it takes is an orkut account and some ability to tell white lies :-) , its that simple.). The psychologist inside me plunged into action in collaboration with Ion to create a hell lot of fake profiles with sexy girls’ snaps. We weaved a lot of imagination and did tons of psychoanalysis on desperate boys who wanted to date, notwithstanding our own friends. We learnt a lot in the process, and we grew sick of the fun. So the nest time you time www.orkut.com and login, remember that:

1)       your productivity goes down like a negative exponential function.

2)       You just show off, its an exercise in online masturbation, nothing more.

3)       The beautiful clandestine girl who scrapped you maybe your “guy next door!”.

P.S: The author is an orkut expert, you can visit his profile by searching for this blog address.

The anatomy of a headache

Disclaimer:
Whatever expressed here happened factually, right in front of my eyes. Rather, behind my eyes.

I was tired of convincing myself that I was hale and healthy on Saturday evening. I was just having a mild headache, which by the weekend assumed monstrous proportions. This was the worst headaches I’ve ever had in my whole life. It was worth a post about headaches for various reasons. One is the fact that headaches have always been a part and parcel of my life. Second vital reason was, this headache I had changed the way I look at myself.

Headaches were a mystery for a long time. Back when I was 8 years old, I presumed that the inside of the head was like a coconut. When I got my recognizable maiden headache, I imagined that the inside of my fictious coconut was dried up of all the water and hence the head ached. When I turned 12, I became a little mature when it came to headaches, so did my imagination. I held to the popular fad that if you did have a persistent headache, it was time for you to wear glasses. Even my family members clung to the same opinion. Then I imagined that when your brain starting growing, your cranium couldn’t accommodate the increase in size, so it ached. (Had my hypothesis been right in the wildest chance, cronies would look like eerie aliens!)

Eventually, after half-reading a lot of science books and encyclopedias, I developed scientific ways of looking at a headache. One opinion struck to my head till today. That headache(pain, in general) was your body’s way of telling “put off your tedium, you jerk! Its time to unwind.” I also learnt the sorry fact that our dear old brains stop growing after 20 or so years. Things became more disastrous when I stopped being an ignoramus. A headache made me panic like crazy. What if it was a deadly new virus? Meningitis maybe. But gradually, I became immune to such atypical headaches, and none of them killed me. They just came and went like Christmas or new year. Sometimes, I wouldn’t call it a day if they failed to come.

When I turned 20, I started introspecting headaches with a “root cause analysis” approach. If I ever had one, I would sit and wind back in time, thinking what I did to get this thing on my poor head. Possible outcomes were hangover after a mild dosage of alcohol, smoking or too much computer usage. Root cause analysis did little help, apart from aggravating my headaches. I was sure that excessive computer usage was a main reason for my persistent headaches. Some smart folks suggested me to use an anti-static screen and all that, but it failed to make an impression in me. Partly because, if anti-static screen was so essential, why wouldn’t they make it a part of the computer monitor?

Things didn’t change much. Sometimes, excruciating pain got your imagination on the run. The recent headache almost got me convinced that I was the first case in Bangalore of a Dengue epidemic. I don’t know why a wretched mosquito would bite me (of all people) in spite of the state’s stringent measures to curb dengue. I once thought I had brain tumor. I thought myself facing a grim doctor, who removed his spectacles and wore a sad face to tell “ I’m terribly sorry Mr.Badri, you have a so and so super-hyper-o-mia. You have only 3 days to live. Please inform the concerned personnel.”

If I ever had 3 days to live, I would waste 2.5 days figuring out what I would do, and whatever I wanted to do couldn’t be done in half a day. So, I will die a rather confusing death, and doing nothing at all. Now back to the headache. As I came out of my hallucinations, I was sitting alone on my couch with a splitting headache. To watch your peers rejoicing when you have a headache, is a mean thing. It sure makes me green. I put a self-sympathetic expression and break a tete-a-tete with them(in order not to feel left out and sick). Some people fall for that, most don’t.

Most headaches are harmlessly small, and don’t last for more than a day or two. In case they do, I resort to extreme measures. I go for pain killers, and they work wonderfully well. The next day, when I’m in the pink of my health, little do I realize how interesting headaches are. When I am out fresh from a headache spell, I give very good throughput and sap all my abilities to the fullest, as I come to know that sound health isn’t as eternal as it seems. I waste a lot of precious time when in good health on small talk, unwanted regrets and musings. Any work can become an unfinished one when a sudden headache creeps in and spoils your otherwise boring life. So, hail the occasional headache!

P.S you could bet that the author has scribbled this in the midst of a bad headache.