Posted on 22nd August 2019
This one’s going to be a tough one. Not because I am short on words, but that I have to constantly remind myself that I am just as guilty as anyone and everyone I refer to herein, of the hypocrisy we commit unto our walls. The virtual world in general and deny the pleasure it gives us surreptitiously. Guilty as hell I say.
At the time I was born and for a significant period thereafter, the biggest joy I shared, offline naturally, was when the black and white Dyanora TV got replaced by a Panasonic set. When a 3 tonne #MTNL landline made way for a blacker and sleeker and definitely lighter, Sony cordless handset. A #Philips stereo was beaten by its Bengali cousin #Bose and when someone’s #Maruti 800 got upgraded to a Maruti 1000. What total madness.
Don’t bother googling it if you weren’t born in the 70’s or the 80‘s my friend.
These joys, of buying a TTK blank cassette and ensuring it said R & RW on it made a world of difference, because this was recycling at another level. You could rerecord and overwrite the bloody songs when the Grammies went past that year and #MCHammer wasn’t the flavour anymore and #VanillaIce strutted his stuff instead. The fridge, oh the superb joy of feeling all that captured, frozen air, wisp onto your face after a hot day at school, because the AC was strictly for the night-times.
Now imagine me sharing all this intense joy onto a wall. Just wouldn’t cut it really. Thing is, I needed to tell... no, Show my friends what miracles I had worked discovering how to rewind, pause, record and play the same song, onto the spool in a single take, without winding out the silken brown tape into a loop of mangled disaster. It was an achievement when I was 10. At 15. Even at 18 to be fair!
Facebook, dear darling #Facebook, you simply wouldn’t have been enough. Or so I think.
Holidays. That’s a biggie, because you had to be terribly rich to do an international holiday in your summers. It usually ended up being hearty visits to grandparents, within a few thousand mile radii in the motherland and back, lugging suitcases on over-bridges towards a glistening Rajdhani or a beat up Kalka or a gasping Deluxe Express. And I am not even getting into the fun of securing your own bunk-bed on that journey. Shatabdi wasn’t a thing quite yet.
This is 80’s India and #AirIndia was still the cat’s whiskers on rates per seat. You needed to narrate every single whoosh in your belly every single time the plane taxied onto the runway. That ... how do I post that chuckle, that flutter, that terror?? And then there was the whole feeling of walking past all those lovely fancy people, smiling at them through the aisle, silently proclaiming to yourself that you were actually cool enough to be on their plane by the sheer virtue of the fact that even your daddy could buy those tickets. Frickkin’ rich is what it felt like!!
Your family camera, #Nikon or maybe an heirloom #Yashika was usually a very reliable, grey, heavy, unusually thick strapped firmly to your neck, instrument. It didn’t always work or load the film correctly. Angry instances of coming back with a dark empty roll as proof of a fabulous vacation have been known to abound. But when they did click right, you knew the images would make everyone look disarmingly happy or just plain charmingly stupid.
Not hot. Never hot.
Always a smile though, it managed to bring to the face. These holiday photos from childhood were so trapped in time, in that time when clothes, brands and figures didn’t matter. When the backdrop was usually a very dark part of the hotel. Because you weren’t thinking lens exposure or brilliance or contrast on an image manicuring Iphone. Because only one person in the whole band of family members bothered to click anything at all... that guy wearing the strap-on camera, he had one bloody job...and the rest couldn’t care less. At any given point some moronic cousin’s eyelid was discovered squeezed shut in a sun inflicted wince or mouth too widely open, munching something utterly impossible to digest visually. But just perfect.
Middle class I know, but what the hell.
And then. You got your first #walkman. How many times did you wear it like a neon sign on your chest I wonder... how loud could you possibly listen to a song? I don’t know. It was never damaging to any ear drum that I can recall. #MJ was god back then and #Madonna was, well, Madonna. Music and lyrics were religion. You had to know your music. All of it. Because your friends knew it, jobless b@#%$%ds. You never got to Google this shit. You just had to know. Because you, in your haloed moment of glory had claimed you ‘like’ this music. Screw you if you didn’t nuance the third paragraph where #BryanAdams went into a Cloud no. 9 encore with no extra words. These were landmines. Real ones. And you stepped on them gleefully, delighted when you got the parts right. Snigger et al.
I find every single image on Facebook absolutely stunning. Crafted with great care and love. Capturing endlessly, moments of beauty and pure designer essence. Trying to relive, displaying live at times just how special that moment truly was ...how much it meant to stand outside the Duomo at Milan and watch the lights dim as the streets came alive with roasted chestnut smells and gelato stores. How much in love you were when the Seine flowed silently under your Bateaux cruising by the glittering Eiffel. How exotic the food was when the waves lapped at your feet gently near some resort in Bali. How much you shrieked when the instructor pushed your sorry arse out of the helicopter you paid for with your liver, lung and perhaps a kidney.
Yes, captivating all of it. Surreal sometimes too, on Instagram when the Clarendon version or the Rise version of the same image gets it just right... the light in the original was fading, but here on XPro II, it looks like the real deal.
Then why is it that I don’t feel what it felt like when I was a child, a teenager even? What is it that I hunt for in this trillion byte infested data street of life and its immaculately capsuled moments? I have connected with so much of my past thanks to this absolute genius of an App and here I sit in judgement, demanding it bring back something so intangible from my childhood which I know doesn’t exist anymore.
Spoilt of me? Yes, Indeed.
Truth is, I am the child of endless summers, listening to romantic songs on train rides, changing batteries, staring intently into dark empty windows, waiting for that one single glimmer of light hung in a hut far, far away in a village I have never been to and never will. A child of late night radio shows on #AIR and Wonder Years episodes on picture-tube TV sets. Here I sit, gizmo and tech in hand, waiting for time to unravel and take me back repeatedly to simplicity. It is painful, this yearning for the impossible. And so wrong in its own way.
Because, I am also shameless enough to use this very forum to capture every living breathing detail of my everyday and write it down at exceptional lengths, on the same tech infested forum and find it insufficient. Shame on me.
So, what is it that I need from this virtual universe, what do I miss? The sensory? The touch and feel of the real? The people and their homes that never ever locked its’ doors on me? Where I never knocked nor checked the time to enter or leave? Friends I could visit? Sit with? Waste away with? And not with alcohol, but with incredibly bad humour or worse... their thoughts on the opposite sex? My son tells me it’s all in my head. VR is the new thing and you can touch and feel everything, like it was real. He would know. He can feel it.
I can’t.
Instead I feel this enormous handicap that is surrounding me every time I am online. Like I am a visitor from another planet, trying desperately to breathe this new chemical called air and like the smell of oxygen in it. Why am I not at home with it? Is it an age thing? Trying to fit in too hard? Keen to be counted as young and with it? Unaware of what truly is the purpose of that all-captivating #Hashtag?
Mesmerised I am at the million likes and followers who trace the lives of the sensible and the senseless, full of a seamless string of opinions and some would say, wisdom. Am I less wise? Is what I write or say not worthy of all this time spent online, trying to be liked? Why is it so urgent to get past that 1000 like mark each time I post something ...Is it very significant to be counted among the online people of this planet? Do I care what goes on, on #twitter? Should I care what people have to say about everything, from cats to catastrophes involving cats?
Is it so essential to be followed? Do we all need to be ratified? To be rated. To be ranked? Is it some childhood insecurity, to belong to a gang? To be a part of something bigger than ourselves and fear of not being counted among the millions? Is it a mob urge? Is it possible that I still need only those friends who I for one know will find the time to read what I write and I hope that here at least they will find the time to connect with me? Does Facebook really know how much I miss them? How badly I miss my growing up years? Do people at Facebook feel this way too? Is that why this App works so seamlessly?
Yes. I think it does and I think they do. It does plug a hole somewhere too deep to be seen with the naked eye or the naked reality of how desperately lonely we are, how much a few friends coming over matters, how much family gatherings at a wedding makes up for the lost time spent over accounts of smiling faces at soirees over sips of the best Bordeaux a million miles from home. I know I need to fill that gap. I can’t, not admit, that for this time, this need, I feel an unbearable lightness of being counted as family, on #Facebook and its giant family tree... to be remembered as one of you.
This one’s going to be a tough one. Not because I am short on words, but that I have to constantly remind myself that I am just as guilty as anyone and everyone I refer to herein, of the hypocrisy we commit unto our walls. The virtual world in general and deny the pleasure it gives us surreptitiously. Guilty as hell I say.
At the time I was born and for a significant period thereafter, the biggest joy I shared, offline naturally, was when the black and white Dyanora TV got replaced by a Panasonic set. When a 3 tonne #MTNL landline made way for a blacker and sleeker and definitely lighter, Sony cordless handset. A #Philips stereo was beaten by its Bengali cousin #Bose and when someone’s #Maruti 800 got upgraded to a Maruti 1000. What total madness.
Don’t bother googling it if you weren’t born in the 70’s or the 80‘s my friend.
These joys, of buying a TTK blank cassette and ensuring it said R & RW on it made a world of difference, because this was recycling at another level. You could rerecord and overwrite the bloody songs when the Grammies went past that year and #MCHammer wasn’t the flavour anymore and #VanillaIce strutted his stuff instead. The fridge, oh the superb joy of feeling all that captured, frozen air, wisp onto your face after a hot day at school, because the AC was strictly for the night-times.
Now imagine me sharing all this intense joy onto a wall. Just wouldn’t cut it really. Thing is, I needed to tell... no, Show my friends what miracles I had worked discovering how to rewind, pause, record and play the same song, onto the spool in a single take, without winding out the silken brown tape into a loop of mangled disaster. It was an achievement when I was 10. At 15. Even at 18 to be fair!
Facebook, dear darling #Facebook, you simply wouldn’t have been enough. Or so I think.
Holidays. That’s a biggie, because you had to be terribly rich to do an international holiday in your summers. It usually ended up being hearty visits to grandparents, within a few thousand mile radii in the motherland and back, lugging suitcases on over-bridges towards a glistening Rajdhani or a beat up Kalka or a gasping Deluxe Express. And I am not even getting into the fun of securing your own bunk-bed on that journey. Shatabdi wasn’t a thing quite yet.
This is 80’s India and #AirIndia was still the cat’s whiskers on rates per seat. You needed to narrate every single whoosh in your belly every single time the plane taxied onto the runway. That ... how do I post that chuckle, that flutter, that terror?? And then there was the whole feeling of walking past all those lovely fancy people, smiling at them through the aisle, silently proclaiming to yourself that you were actually cool enough to be on their plane by the sheer virtue of the fact that even your daddy could buy those tickets. Frickkin’ rich is what it felt like!!
Your family camera, #Nikon or maybe an heirloom #Yashika was usually a very reliable, grey, heavy, unusually thick strapped firmly to your neck, instrument. It didn’t always work or load the film correctly. Angry instances of coming back with a dark empty roll as proof of a fabulous vacation have been known to abound. But when they did click right, you knew the images would make everyone look disarmingly happy or just plain charmingly stupid.
Not hot. Never hot.
Always a smile though, it managed to bring to the face. These holiday photos from childhood were so trapped in time, in that time when clothes, brands and figures didn’t matter. When the backdrop was usually a very dark part of the hotel. Because you weren’t thinking lens exposure or brilliance or contrast on an image manicuring Iphone. Because only one person in the whole band of family members bothered to click anything at all... that guy wearing the strap-on camera, he had one bloody job...and the rest couldn’t care less. At any given point some moronic cousin’s eyelid was discovered squeezed shut in a sun inflicted wince or mouth too widely open, munching something utterly impossible to digest visually. But just perfect.
Middle class I know, but what the hell.
And then. You got your first #walkman. How many times did you wear it like a neon sign on your chest I wonder... how loud could you possibly listen to a song? I don’t know. It was never damaging to any ear drum that I can recall. #MJ was god back then and #Madonna was, well, Madonna. Music and lyrics were religion. You had to know your music. All of it. Because your friends knew it, jobless b@#%$%ds. You never got to Google this shit. You just had to know. Because you, in your haloed moment of glory had claimed you ‘like’ this music. Screw you if you didn’t nuance the third paragraph where #BryanAdams went into a Cloud no. 9 encore with no extra words. These were landmines. Real ones. And you stepped on them gleefully, delighted when you got the parts right. Snigger et al.
I find every single image on Facebook absolutely stunning. Crafted with great care and love. Capturing endlessly, moments of beauty and pure designer essence. Trying to relive, displaying live at times just how special that moment truly was ...how much it meant to stand outside the Duomo at Milan and watch the lights dim as the streets came alive with roasted chestnut smells and gelato stores. How much in love you were when the Seine flowed silently under your Bateaux cruising by the glittering Eiffel. How exotic the food was when the waves lapped at your feet gently near some resort in Bali. How much you shrieked when the instructor pushed your sorry arse out of the helicopter you paid for with your liver, lung and perhaps a kidney.
Yes, captivating all of it. Surreal sometimes too, on Instagram when the Clarendon version or the Rise version of the same image gets it just right... the light in the original was fading, but here on XPro II, it looks like the real deal.
Then why is it that I don’t feel what it felt like when I was a child, a teenager even? What is it that I hunt for in this trillion byte infested data street of life and its immaculately capsuled moments? I have connected with so much of my past thanks to this absolute genius of an App and here I sit in judgement, demanding it bring back something so intangible from my childhood which I know doesn’t exist anymore.
Spoilt of me? Yes, Indeed.
Truth is, I am the child of endless summers, listening to romantic songs on train rides, changing batteries, staring intently into dark empty windows, waiting for that one single glimmer of light hung in a hut far, far away in a village I have never been to and never will. A child of late night radio shows on #AIR and Wonder Years episodes on picture-tube TV sets. Here I sit, gizmo and tech in hand, waiting for time to unravel and take me back repeatedly to simplicity. It is painful, this yearning for the impossible. And so wrong in its own way.
Because, I am also shameless enough to use this very forum to capture every living breathing detail of my everyday and write it down at exceptional lengths, on the same tech infested forum and find it insufficient. Shame on me.
So, what is it that I need from this virtual universe, what do I miss? The sensory? The touch and feel of the real? The people and their homes that never ever locked its’ doors on me? Where I never knocked nor checked the time to enter or leave? Friends I could visit? Sit with? Waste away with? And not with alcohol, but with incredibly bad humour or worse... their thoughts on the opposite sex? My son tells me it’s all in my head. VR is the new thing and you can touch and feel everything, like it was real. He would know. He can feel it.
I can’t.
Instead I feel this enormous handicap that is surrounding me every time I am online. Like I am a visitor from another planet, trying desperately to breathe this new chemical called air and like the smell of oxygen in it. Why am I not at home with it? Is it an age thing? Trying to fit in too hard? Keen to be counted as young and with it? Unaware of what truly is the purpose of that all-captivating #Hashtag?
Mesmerised I am at the million likes and followers who trace the lives of the sensible and the senseless, full of a seamless string of opinions and some would say, wisdom. Am I less wise? Is what I write or say not worthy of all this time spent online, trying to be liked? Why is it so urgent to get past that 1000 like mark each time I post something ...Is it very significant to be counted among the online people of this planet? Do I care what goes on, on #twitter? Should I care what people have to say about everything, from cats to catastrophes involving cats?
Is it so essential to be followed? Do we all need to be ratified? To be rated. To be ranked? Is it some childhood insecurity, to belong to a gang? To be a part of something bigger than ourselves and fear of not being counted among the millions? Is it a mob urge? Is it possible that I still need only those friends who I for one know will find the time to read what I write and I hope that here at least they will find the time to connect with me? Does Facebook really know how much I miss them? How badly I miss my growing up years? Do people at Facebook feel this way too? Is that why this App works so seamlessly?
Yes. I think it does and I think they do. It does plug a hole somewhere too deep to be seen with the naked eye or the naked reality of how desperately lonely we are, how much a few friends coming over matters, how much family gatherings at a wedding makes up for the lost time spent over accounts of smiling faces at soirees over sips of the best Bordeaux a million miles from home. I know I need to fill that gap. I can’t, not admit, that for this time, this need, I feel an unbearable lightness of being counted as family, on #Facebook and its giant family tree... to be remembered as one of you.
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