Better off off-line!...

My friend Divi met Brick on the internet and they eventually became the best of friends (more like e-brother and sister if I’m not wrong). So the other day when I found out about this thing at Brick’s blog, I was amazed. Not that Divi hadn’t ever mentioned it to me. But at that time, it somehow didn’t strike me like this. So I told Brick that this entire notion of meeting people and becoming friends with them over the internet is kinda creepy for me. And I set to wonder why. I mean what IS the harm in making friends over the internet? Why is it that I for some strange reason have never been able to think that it is very much possible for one to find a good friend in an e-companion?

Possibility No. 1: Having stayed all your life in an over-protected environment, you have always been told by the distrustful lot (who, surprisingly you don not even remember, they were) not to ever have reliance on anything that is electronic, be it the E-mail or the E-banking or the EEnternet (he he).

Possibility No. 2: Just when you’ve turned adolescent and feel that you are finally ready to interact with people over the internet and you open your first mail account on Yahoo, you hear about this really great thing called chatting in school. So you go about exploring it thinking you would bump into nice people who would probably have nice things to talk about. A silly friend at school tells you to go join chat rooms where people discuss nice stuff. But just when you thought it’s gonna be fun, you somehow end up bumping only into maniacs who can’t stop discussing sex even in a chat room titled “India Speaks”. You try to get out of there as soon as possible, but your pace is slowed down by random chat windows incessantly popping up on your screen with people asking only a single question: “ASL?”. You wonder whatever happened to the good old word “Hi” but somehow manage to get out. You log off and secretly decide never to go on chat rooms again.

Possibility No. 3: You’re soaring your way through your teens and decide to be a little optimistic about the internet. But then you hear of cases all across where people who used e-accounts and e-banking have been robbed off of all their money. The distrustful lot (remember? The ones whom I cant remember? Yah! They’re the ones I’m talking about) make full use of these deplorable examples to inculcate a secret fear of the people whom one can meet online.
And if that were not enough, you come across this news article about people hooking up online and deciding to meet up under the impression that the other one will have the same “asl” as he/she proclaimed, only to be disappointed and robbed or mistreated by some stranger who was nothing compared to what they had imagined. You conveniently presume that everyone who decides to talk to people on the internet is a desperate freak, who will surely lie about his/her specifications only to trap you into meeting him/her one day and kidnapping you to be thrown off on some non-existent island where you’d be forced to beg or be eaten alive (if you’re lucky).

Possibility No. 4: You reach the latter half of your teens and hear of this cool community called orkut. Ignoring the discouraging voices of the distrustful lot (C’mon, I don’t need to tell you every time?) in your head, you decide to check it out and join in. So while randomly looking up at your friends’ profiles you find a weird similarity between the profiles of all those friends of yours who happen to be girls. They all seem to be having strange obtuse scraps from random guys reading nothing more than, “You hot, I likes, me good, want to be friendship”. Your first reaction is to thank your parents for sending you to a school where they made it a point to teach grammar along with the words (unlike in these cases). You feel this momentary sympathy for female kind because such desperate losers are found only amongst guys and you thank Mother Nature for making you a guy (Luckily, girls are almost never such freaks). You seek apologies from the distrustful lot hovering in your head (now giving you a victorious smirk in the “I told you” fashion) and decide that while on orkut, you would use it only to stay in touch with those whom you already know and never make new friends there.
You officially come to the conclusion that everyone who goes on the internet is either highly desperate or highly stupid.

Possibility No. 5: As you sit watching TV one day, you come across this News channel X (which has now become famous for being the news channel which sensationalizes almost everything, even a crow in Mumbai city!!) in which a scary man tells you how people who go in for online matrimonial sites get fooled in some way or the other.

Possibility No. 6: On top of everything else, the distrustful lot (They just keep coming back! Darmit! Who the hell are these people?) somehow convince you that internet surfing is an addiction as they gossip about how the only reason for a certain couple, Mr. and Mrs. X’s phone bill being exorbitant was because their son sat online watching porn all day. You, being the nice cultured chap you always thought you are, make up your mind never to be a slave to the internet and never to trust anyone whom you come across over the internet.

Changed Scenario: June 21, 2008; 4:00 PM: You sit thinking that may be you were wrong (but only a little bit!). The distrustful lot does not haunt you anymore. You have now grown up and you realize that it might be true that one cannot be too sure of whom to interact with on the internet but you don’t need to be scared or anything because not EVERYONE is a freak there. You should be open to the idea that there might, just might (I’m still not too optimistic) be good people there also. So you grow out of the absolutely negative notion (now its just plain and simple negative..but hey! At least there’s an improvement) and realize that internet is not a parallel universe with strange creatures roaming around (which you thought till now) but it is made up of humans after all (of course at the same time not forgetting that a lot many of them ARE still freaks..but again! improvement at least). All thanks to two people: Thank you Divi and Sukrit.