Fine. Making truce with this fact i have decided to write out a story this time around
hope you enjoy it....
JONNY....NO ORKUTTING!!
“Me & Mah Roomie”, click->transfer->upload->caption. As VEB typed, he had a sly smile stuck between his canines. An unconquered & self satisfied one.”So what’s your name? You from? Late on the first day, huh? Way to go dude!” & many more khow-ur-roomie FAQs. Well, I caught hold of a few of them, mustered all my broken English, and managed to say,
TAKE 1 “urrr….helooo” (Whoa! I said something…gr8!!).VEB’s expectant glow slowly fell to the floor in a series of installments, like pellets falling off a goat’s derrière. His bat-like ears quivered like an antenna to catch every/any syllable I uttered, figures stopped dancing on the keyboard, giving way to an uncomfortably loud silence. Finally he breathed, “Bus itna hi?”(Oh! I did greet him, didn’t that suffice?)
TAKE 2 “Uh……. Hi....Hamara... naam PAWAN hai….I am from Jharsuguda….Hamare yahan se BHU ke liye direct train nahi hai….” Lo! My broken hinglish had answered all his lemme –know-u-well queries. VEB stretched out his hand, still aboard his laptop. I reached out for it, circumspect as a kid from an all boys’ school greeting a girl for the first time. This guy was from another world to me. Someone told me, ‘the first hand you grasp in college usually holds on to you for the rest of your life’. Well said.
“Dude, how many fans do u have?”Another question like an unwrapped present for me. I stopped unloading my rucksack. My mind ran to ceiling fans, from the oriental ones hanging in my house to dadaji’s ancient table fan, still living up to its punch line of “chalta rahe”. Blank face. “Sorry ….I didn’t get u….I mean …I have 3 back home…1 here…..”
”Man….you there on ORKUT, right? Or are you the FACEBOOK types? Lemme tell you, I don’t like the latter “, he said, as he banged his fist on that rickety table, as if belonging to that genre meant anti-INDIAN.
“Err VEB, pardon me….but…I didn’t get a word of your question about fans…?”
”WHAT?” he sounded as if INDIA had lost a winning ODI. As if TSUNAMI had hit us again. As if the sky had fallen and he was Chicken Little. Or, more likely, if I was responsible for all of the above!! “You don’t have fans or is it that you don’t generally surf…for heaven sake don’t say you’re not into ORKUTTING?!” another bouncer from VEB. Man this guy could lambast any geek. Such a heavy word “ORRRKU…”, and he could pronounce it so easily. I appreciated him mentally.
“Well…VEB main ORKUTTING nahi karta…” I answered as if it was an addiction to contraband substance.”Are you nuts dumb ass…you not there on orkut…” VEB quickly went a few pages back, unloaded the cute pic of ours & with a u-have-upset-me face he reverted back to his business of keyboard crunching, & I continued unpacking & cleaning up the messiest room I’ve ever laid my eyes on.
To be away from home means to gulp down unpalatable mess food. Yes, seriously. “MESS FOOD”. Bid a heartfelt adieu to mum’s lip smacking cooking and say hello to pulses diluted below measurable concentration.
Well, I entered the LIMBDI mess to see humungous piles of food strewn on the tables, freshers like me searching for eatables amidst the crap, and old timers hogging down what ever came their way.
I went a few steps to be seated across another freshie, SHAMAK, an amiable chap, I would say. Round face, glistening eyes & polite enough to befriended. We exchanged some pleasantries, then minded our ways, both searching for anything that reminded us of home in that debris of alien cuisine.
Should I ask or not? What if he does not know about it, still suffering from the log-kya-sochenge syndrome.
“Yaar, ye ORKUT kya hai?”I quipped, secret enough not to be overheard by any of my mess co-partners, putting on a completely innocent cum straight face like a teenager who doesn’t understand QUANTUM mech.
SHAMAK stopped gulping down a piece of what I guessed was roti already midway down his throat, and gave me a sly understanding smile. I was getting more than my share of this smile lately, and I hated it more and more every minute.
“You know PAWAN, I have a brother at IITD”, SHAMAK stuffed a bite and continued, “He gave me 3 ‘don’ts’ for college. 1. Drugs 2.Excessive porn (with a wink) 3.ORKUT”, each one counted off neatly on his fingers.”So basically it’s an illicit activity, the addiction of which will doom you”. Some wise guy listening in intently on our conversation quipped, “So did your brother give you a set of ‘dos’ then?”.
“Yeah”, replied S with a grin, “The 3 ‘don’ts’!”
I rhetorically narrated the disgustful incident with VEB & how small town I felt. Moved by my sentiments, SHAMAK, like an elder brother explained the concepts of ORKUT, social networking, connecting with friends, chatting, scraps et al.
Whoa! That’s a lot of potential in a website!!” In fact, reading CHADWICK’s nucleus discovery was less impactful than learning ‘basic-concepts-of-orkutting’ by Mr. SHAMAK. Gleefully I thanked SHAMAK for teaching me the divine knowledge of social networking. He minced words like “get close with friends, closer with the chicks” that hovered in my mind. I briskly strode towards the LIMBDI common room, spotted a PC with broad band connectivity, sought help from peers, finally typed in http://www.orkut.com/ & behold as a tinge of sky blue engulfed the screen, my pulse about to explode, like another JEE result would appear in a matter of seconds.
The screen flashed, monitor glowed in the most shockingly repulsive shade of pink I’d ever seen. But I was no one to comment. I was just a small towner.
ORKUT. ‘Who do you know?’ it claimed, and immediately I began listing to my memory, all my near and dear ones who could grace my prospective friends’ list. Tricky thing, this list is. I’ve always wondered if the people on the list can make a legal claim on my will, if I ever have one!
While ORKUTTING, you always tend to end up chatting up a girl you’ve never met, while totally ignoring people you’ve known all your life. Why not just call it the stranger’s list then? Dunno. But I do know one thing. All these ‘.coms’ fed to us as social networking sites sell nothing but farce. You see, the world as it is, is tedious enough to be handled in real life. So, no one should really bother to mess up his cyber world too. What these portals do sell us, is a fantasy. A society you can build according to your own liking and it’s this fictitious power that is so addictive. Addictive enough to be placed on someone’s ‘do/don’t’ list.
I spent the next hour trying to log on to the damned thing, but the pink logo wouldn’t budge. No Id seemed to be good enough for this letter gobbling monster, and then came on those silly boxes with what looked more like a crow skating on ice, than letters.
People believe IITians are the world’s biggest geeks. Well, congratulations to them, they’re right! But in the defense of my brethren, I’d like to offer that we’re not genetically coded that way. It takes years of toil and patience to achieve this state of nirvana. And, acknowledging this self abusive effort, India reciprocates by marrying us off to the prettiest daughters of the country. I can bet that for at least 50%of the guys here, placements are a secondary allure. One can safely say that the JEE is India’s strictest celibacy oath. Once you’re sworn in, you know you’re not gonna get any wares anytime soon. But as soon as you get out of it, you have the swankiest china waiting for you just beyond the gates. It’s our reward, for becoming the most sexually perverted bunch of the generation! God help India!!
Maybe that was when the first doubts crept into my mind, regarding my abilities as a technocrat. I wasn’t a geek!! I couldn’t make head or tail of this id-password puzzle. It took five over-enthusiastic peers and another thirty minutes of computer gibberish to get me to open my own account. Thank god banks still used paper!!
My own account!! My own world!! My own fantasy.
SHAMAK’s brother was right. Orkut is the cheapest high you can get in college. Within a week, my vital counts were 227(friends), 3546(scraps), 120(communities. “Ha!! Take that VEB!!” I thought to myself, “Far ahead of you in a week!! No wonder I was 68 ranks above you!!”
I had taken up the mission of hunting down every single person in college that I’d met, seen, or even heard of. My stats grew exponentially. There were failed attempts, especially among girls. Some of them even went beyond the normal courtesies to reply back with stuff as insulting as “Sorry, I don’t add strangers!!” But my success rate was too high to bother about these minor hiccups. I used every trick in the book from lying in my profile to chatting in my scrapbook to keep improving the stats, and survive in this fame frenzied wonderland.
Wherever mankind sets foot, it leaves behind a trail of cut-throat competition. It’s the only kind of pollution we cause. The rest are just untapped sources of energy.
Owing to my efforts, I had managed to talk to more girls in the college than I could count on my fingers. No mean feat for a small towner!! Orkut was the one place I could ‘not be myself’ and get lost in the confines of infinite possibilities and fantasies.
A month into enjoying the title of ‘Orkut-baba’ (much to VEB’s utter dismay!), I was woken up one morning by a phone call. This was ragging season. During this time if ever a phone vibrates your thumping heart resonates with it at natural frequency. Unfortunately, I sleep like a stone, and usually I don’t really have any recollection of the first words I utter after a nap.
“You fucking son of a bitch!!” someone was shouting into speaker.
“Yeah, hi”, I replied. This was college.
“Hi!! Do you have any idea who you’re talking to behenchod??!! Tera baap bol raha hun!!”
That was when I got into my scared shitless mode, and stuttered, “gggg….good morning sir!!” I glanced wildly at the screen. It was VIKAS, a third year goliath from my branch, chemical. He had ragged me once and when he had towered over me growling, I felt like a Pomeranian pissing under the Eiffel tower. Frankly, my bladder was churning from the wild shakes my insides were going through.
“I’m gonna blow your brains out you scumbag!! You have no idea who you’ve pissed off!! Bohat orkutting karta hai na!! Aj teri ek ek ungli kaat ke tere muh me thusta hun!! ANITA pe chance mar ke tune apna bohat ganda katva liya!! Tonight at 8. My room.”
“Yyyy…yes sir…”
Click. The phone went silent. ‘Doomed’, I thought. Nita was the college bombshell. Or so it was famous.
Beauty has always been a relative term in IITs, and it’s our uncanny ability to adapt that sets us apart from the rest. Dump us with a bunch of eunuchs and we’ll still find you a showstopper!! Boys here always manage to find someone dainty enough to drink their way to depression for.
So, ANITA was the bomb. What I did not know was that VIKAS was her damned shell. When I narrated my plight to VEB, he ogled at me for a few seconds, then hissed “You idiot!! Don’t you know she’s his incest sister?!”
“His what?!”
“Oh, you know. She ties him a rakhi every year, and he screws her in his dreams!! It’s a relationship of mutual benefit. Symbiosis!!”
Gulp. Whoever this relation was benefitting, I knew it wasn’t me. I was dead meat.
If you’ve ever been ragged you know the wait is worse than the blow. After a day of numbing anticipation, I landed up at Vikas’s doorstep, almost comatose. Somewhere in that room, I remember dropping the notion that there was any good in this world, and to this day I’m still looking for it. The man blew me apart in every way possible. Physically, mentally, psychologically. I could give you a detailed description but that would mean confessing to a few acts you’d have thought were humanly impossible, and, consequently, I’ve always denied.
At the end of the session, he told me to delete my blasted orkut account and if he ever saw me again in cyber world, he’d break me like a twig.
I ran all the way back to my hostel, found an unoccupied laptop, logged on to orkut, raised my finger high in order to hit ‘delete’, then froze. Have you ever seen a coke addict throw away even chalk powder? Or a toluene addict use whitener as correcting ink? I couldn’t do it. Orkut was my emancipation.
Instead, I chose to lose myself deep in the oblivions of cyber space. A new identity, a new profile and a little refrain from any mention of my present status, and I’d be ready, ready to be GOD again.
GOD working out of a dingy alley on the internet. Ironic, isn’t it?
Since then, my profile reads ‘JONNY…..NO ORKUTTING’!!!
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