Lif-e

Lif-e

Yesterday, I met Rana, a long lost school friend. I promptly shared my joy with my mother and her reply was a question, where? The baffling answer compelled her to revisit the geography lessons but she could not figure out Orkut on the world map!
The poor thing did not understand how people meet on the computer and got intrigued enough to open an account. Then she asked me to find her long lost friend ‘Chandan’ believing the computer to be a Gennie! It is my turn to be baffled now. How does one explain a net-working site to a person who opens her leather-bound address book, searches for a phone number and dials it from her mobile? Would she understand, now-a-days people not only make out but also make babies on the Facebook!
When my elder generation passively observes my routine, they mutter, “at least we had a life”. I retort mentally- and we have a lif-e. You may also write it as Lif_e, that is, a life where e underscores.
The boundaries between life and lif-e are blurring for us. We no longer talk, we scrap. Distances have diminished and meeting people after years is no longer bundled with a shock or surprise. Of course, we had already seen their prospering tummies, grown up babies, seventh anniversary pictures etc., online. Heck, we even know what they are feeling like at any point of time thanks to their G-talk or Facebook status.
According to common understanding Jane Coloccia would be a loser- she sought dating partners, soul-mate, ideal life partner etc. through online dating. Jane, has now come up with a best-seller called Confessions of an Online Dating Addict: A True Account of Dating and Relating in the Internet Age, elaborating the tricks to spot liars, married ones, perverts etc.. Marriages on the internet are so passé now, that they do not even make it to the content starved 24X7 news channels’ headlines! My friends who have worked hard to gain and retain a love life in their lives have finally posted their profile on shaadi dot com and jeevansathi dot com et al firmly believing that they have found the route to nuptial bliss.
I even shout on my blogs and do not care if no publisher will bind my creative scribbling into a great looking book and place it on the Bestseller Shelf of Crosswords or Landmark, I believe I am already reaching out to people! And I am not the only one, there is a whole tribe of writers who throng the blogs venting out creativity and showing middle finger to regret letters from publishers. Twitter has a novelist posting his novel in parts and is getting read without even publishing the book.
I am on Facebook, linkedin and Orkut. Not to mention that my G-talk is on even when I skip meals to finish work. I rarely small talk with people around me but I do message or ping and I get messaged and pinged in return. So much so that at times I meet about twenty friends online on a given day, jabber with them individually and the socialization leaves me as exhausted as it would in real life.
At my B-school my next-door neighbor and me used to catch up with things on Yahoo Messenger at three in the night, sitting just a wall apart and perfectly free to open one’s door and knock on the other’s. There were emotions which would have probably looked silly when spoken! No, nobody was a lesbian but hugging each other to convey the depth of friendship was not ‘cool’, the emoction worked better.
Today, I meet new people from across the world in online communities sharing similar interests and feel like I belong to one big family. I have received flirts, flowers and wine online and accepted them with a genuine smile, a fete unachievable without getting embarrassed and blushing in the real world.
It’s about 2.30 in the morning and I see people online probably catching up with Lif-e, which for them is synonymous to Life and I my eyes are complaining from staring at the screen for so long.
Darn! I have misplaced my glasses! I wish I could Google them…