anti social networking sites

The other day, a junior from work (read ex-work) asked me to join orkut. Now, i am allergic to all social networking sites. i told him i have an insane desire not be found by anyone or to find anyone in the virtual world.

i have been told i can find long-lost friends, have friends find me. Which is scary if you ask me. i mean, for someone so anti-social like me, that is like hell! i have always maintained that if i want to be in touch with someone it would not be through one-liners or what they call scraps (is that the right term ?). And i just don't want to be 're-discovered' by people i don't want to be in contact with. Which makes you wonder whether i have many skeletons hiding in the cupboard!!

Almost everyone (net-savvy i mean) i know has a parallel existence in the world of orkut or facebook or whatever other sites you have. In my ex-project, all the kids (and the adults too!) always had their orkut accounts open - of course, surreptitiously (but i am eagle eyed) and SC and i always cribbed about project productivity being reduced by people 'scraping' rather than working. SC is the only person in my orbit who does not exist in orkut.

i can never understand why people are so addicted to it. But then, i am an antiquated hag.

Up

You know how much of a sucker i am for animation films. The other day we watched this film 'Up'. What drew me to it was that it was a story of an old man trying to fulfil his dead wife's dream. A romantic animation film - how cool is that? Of course, it is not the kind of cootchie-cooing, mushy stuff. You have the film's prologue showing the couple meeting as kids, falling in love, getting married, getting old and the death of the wife - their entire love story in mabye 5 minute of silent footage.

So if the wife dies before the film hardly takes off, you ask me where is the romance? The romance is in the old man, who cannot even walk unaided, trying to fulfil what is his wife's lifelong dream of going to South America. That is what got me. Maybe the first animation film that brought a lump to my throat.

i wonder if i die now, whether he would cross the sahara for me. Or go watch the aurora borealis. Nay...sigh..sigh...

basketball in the rain

Sometimes, memories are all that is left of happy days, when the world was unencumbered by expectations, when life flowed from one day to the next, when crushes and blushes bloomed, when you were drunk with the possibilities of things to come...

How carefree we were - bunked classes, staying up nights reading M&B and lusting for the forbidden fruit, of adda fuelled by lebu-cha, the mindless chatters, the endless ribbing, those nights at the library mugging up before the semester, the off-tune rendering of 'truly, madly, deeply do', those games of basketball.

When it rains, i remember that evening. When the skies opened up and everyone scurried for shelter, and we braved the rain and carried on playing. Drenched to the bones. With the lighting lighting up the dark night, with the thunder applauding. When our sweat mingled with the rain drops.

i no longer play basketball. i cannot remember the last time i intentionally got myself drenched in the rain. But i still have the memories etched in my mind, like scars of wounds sustained long ago.

of friends and foes

Today, in one of my endless musings passing through my crowded mess of a mind, i was thinking of the people termed as friends.

As a kid, we were not encouraged to mix with the leikai (locality) kids for fear that we would pick up bad words and other bad habits - now you know why i turned out to be such a snob! - and so i had no leikai friend except for a girl (approved by parents as coming from 'good family'!!). They moved elsewhere and so i grew up only with school friends i.e. friends from school (oh yes, we get it ma'am, you really don't need to explain that..god..)

It is a personality flaw i suppose but i am no longer in touch with a single one of them - we, who cried as if the world was coming to an end at the farewell party, scribbled how we would never forget each other on the white school shirt. i still have the shirt but not the friends! It is not as if i cannot trace them - i know all it would take is for me to spend a minute trawling one of those social sites ( which i am allergic to but that is fodder for another post). i even had a couple of them tracing me, seeking me out but i - oh the bitch i am - did not take the stretched hands. Sometimes, i wonder why. Is it that i have outgrown those childish giggly moments? Or is it just that i am a different person now and i want to preserve memories as they are - like the shirt with promises all broken - and don't want to find out that i cannot gel with them anymore? i have steadfastly refused to answer mails from old friends - i guess i am becoming more anti-social as my hair ripens into grey.

What is it that makes me so indifferent to the past? i hate dwelling in it - i like the past to be in the background. But to ignore old friends, does not that smack of something lacking in me - like loyalty?

Which makes me wonder - would the few (very, very, very few) people i call friends now also go this way? i am so good at being alone - i love being alone, sometimes i think i would be perfectly fine if you put me in a room filled with books and an internet connection (so i could regale the world with tales of 'alone-ness') and yes, food.

But i guess with the few friends i have now, i am in more 'stable' relationships.i still have the desire to know if they are alive, to worry about them at times, to abuse them with the choicest of galis, to want them to be in touch with me.. i hope i would continue to pester them with my presence till my sanity deserts me. And i hope they would nag me into not dropping out of the orbit if i should go hibernating, as i am wont to do at times.

What is with the 'foes' part in the title? i have no foe for the simple reason that if i don't like someone, they cease to exist for me.

show me the darkness

i wander from one day to the next.
i sleep-walk through the nights.
i search for the meaning of my existence -
in the mirror,
in the books,
in your eyes,
your smiles,
your frowns,
your touch,
in my fragmented dreams.
i dig for nuggets of happiness
in the dark recess of my mind.
i sow the seeds of depression
and harvest buckets of tear.
i cling on the feet of dreams
that threaten to desert me
i ration my smiles
lest i have none for tomorrow
i seek for darkness
to torment my soul
that lusts for light