Status update : going public

i did come across beautiful article in "times of india" (6th march 2009).I was tempted to cut that piece of the news paper containing this article. Another idea also came simultaneously to present this article on my blog so that others who missed it in TOI can read from here.

Dedicated to everyone who keep their statue message as
"available, available,available" on gtalk. :-)

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GOING PUBLIC
richa jha
TOI: 6th march 2009

My social networking inertia makes me an anomaly in the web world.And what's is worse, one lacks the necessary spunk to announce it through one's status message on Facebook and Gtalk! I find myself at sea, surrounded by souls who wear their lives and emotions on their sleeves, changing their virtual 'status' each time their kitten coughs or the doorbell rings.

I have nothing more to offer by way of originality or wit than the perpetual drab 'available' while real people in the virtual world chronicle, comment upon, celebrate, debate and deliberate every smile, every toilet break and every mood swing. My alter-ego says, girl, cheer up, you at least are a netizen with couple of log-in IDs in your name; look at many around you who still think Gtalk is a dirty word invented by the G-string G-spot brigade and Facebook is a scrapbook full of portraits. But there's little solace in that argument, you'll agree.

We led perfectly non-defunct lives even before we began drawing almost-voyeuristic pleasures out of people's self-advertised mental, bedroom or boardroom one-liners. So since when did the human race get this eloquent en masse? And why this sudden urge to go public with the most personal of mood swings? I know, on any given morning, which of my 'contacts' slept late, which one woke up with a nightmare, who had what for dinner! Must one be told? To be honest, the status tags do make for some interesting eclectic reading! I read these personal opinions of people who, until a couple of years ago, i thought were just like me when there is nothing better to do.

The only opinion we freely dispensed then was whether the latest Govinda flick was more crass than his previous one. Suddenly, to read from them supremely profound, at times abstruse and even comic sentiments like, "life, blanched, smoked, it passes me by", only makes me more insecure about my own linguistic, cerebral and existential prowess. A friend, who has long since taken me off his list of contacts, commented in exasperation, "Available, available, available. Don't you ever have anything interesting to say about yourself? You don't deserve to be online!" Well, he said it.