Life on www.publicdomain.com

My social-networking inertia makes me an anomaly in the web world. And what’s worse, I lack the necessary spunk to announce it through my status message on Facebook and gtalk!

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 find myself at sea. While real people in the virtual world chronicle, comment upon, celebrate, debate and deliberate every smile, every toilet break, every mood swing, I have nothing more to offer by way of originality or wit than the perpetual drab ‘available’ on my gtalk next to the flashing green light. My alter-ego says, girl, cheer up, you at least are a netizen with couple of log-in id’s 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, 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? On any given morning, even before I’ve brushed my teeth, I know which of my ‘contacts’ slept late, which one woke up with a nightmare, who had what for dinner, whose daughter smiled in her dream and who fought with her partner! Must I be told?

To be honest, the status tags do make for some interesting eclectic reading! On days when I have nothing to do (though, again an embarrassing confession about having nothing to do, while the rest of the world sends virtual pokes, nudges, quizzes, battles) I read these personal opinions of the veritable kind by people who, until just a couple of years ago, I thought were just like me. The only opinion we freely dispensed then was whether the latest Govinda flick was more crass or classier than his previous one. Suddenly, to read from them, supremely profound, at times abstruse (and I daresay, 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.