My Experiments with Facebook.. (TRUTH)

So it’s been more than three months since I uploaded/updated anything on my Facebook wall. The last update I’d done was change my profile picture to what it is currently, and that was on 17^th December 2014.

Of course this does not mean I’ve been inactive on FB. I have been visiting my profile every now and then, and liked a post or two and made a comment here or there. And I’ve been getting my daily social media “fix” by having conversations on Whatsapp with close friends and family. But I have not “mass-shared” anything on my wall or with the people in my friends list now for the better part of a quarter of a year. (And yes I know FB owns Whatsapp so don’t bite me)

This experiment began when I thought I’d do a sort of self-discipline check towards the end of last year, when I wanted to see if I could go more than a week or two without doing much on FB.

In a day and age where it’s second nature (or nowadays even first nature) for us to share absolutely everything about our lives with everyone, I thought it would be nice to shut up for a while. You know, not put up my life on display day after day and share with all and sundry, among other non-sense:

• What I had for breakfast
• How bad the traffic was in the morning
• What I did on the weekend
• What gift I got for my birthday/anniversary/Valentine’s Day etc etc.
• My point of view on whatever was the hot topic of the day (a banned video, a cricket tournament, a state election drama.. etc etc)
• How aw-some/ful my job/office is
• Some random post that I found interesting, when I was supposed to be working at said aw-some/ful job
• Details of my lunch
• How bad the traffic was on my way back home
• What my wife cooked for dinner (or if she didn’t, where we went to eat, what we ate and how it was)
• If I was partying, where I partied and who I partied with
• What I was watching on TV late at night
• How I slept
• What I had for breakfast again….

The pattern had become mind numbing and a bit frustrating. So I thought, “Let me not do that for a while and see how it feels.”

And it’s been three months since then and I thought it would be a good time to list down the pros and cons of my little self-imposed mass-social platform exile.

So here goes…The PROs:

  1.       I got more work done!!

 First things first eh? Without a “ding” (or dong or ting-tong or whatever is your notification tone) every other minute from my laptop/phone, I focused more on what I was getting paid to do.

  2.       No social anxiety about being “accepted”

Let me be honest. If I post something, I want a reaction. A like, comment, share, SOMETHING. It’s not a good feeling when you post something you feel (I reiterate FEEL) is cool, and a few hours later, you do not find a single reaction to it. But if you’ve not posted anything, BOOM!! Anxiety GONE..!! Thats a cue for you.. If you're making the effort to read this, do react :)

  3.       You can be a giver

You get to be the guy/girl in those Tata Docomo ads, who help give purpose to the compulsive social media butterflies out there. Because if all you do on FB is make a close ended, congratulatory comment, or like a post made by someone, you do not expect anything in return. You feel like a social media Good Samaritan who’s done his good deed for the day.

  4.       Life in general gets more real

With no posts, there come no notifications, no anxiety of not getting them, and more time to have actual interactions with people who are near you instead of checking every few minutes if you’ve got notifications. You get more time (at least I did) to read, study, play, work.. LIVE in short.

But yet, not everything about my stay-off was rosy. Some things sucked. And here they are. The CONs:

  1.       You miss the attention and the stage

At least initially. From being accustomed and able to reaching out (albeit online) to hundreds of people at once, to being confined to a specific contacts list (read Whatsapp) is a big demotion. Not that the limited Whatsapp interactions were inferior in any way. But you miss the stage that FB provides to do share whatever the hell you want, to a large audience. This blog, for example, I do not intend to post on FB. And therefore, I do not expect it to be read by more than a handful of people. (and that too, after I force it upon them)

  2.       You miss those tiny surprises

Let’s face it, an FB post is a big shout out to whoever is on your friends list. And no matter what crap you post, there will always be someone who reacts. It may not always be the people you wanted to react to your post, but someone who you never expected to react. And there is always a mini-thrill in that. But with no posts, you get no such surprises.

  3.       When you actually have something significant to share

Here’s when I get subjective. And I do not expect many to agree with me. How do you measure the significance of a post or an update?? I mean, your breakfast, or the party you went to last night may be as significant to you as the fact that I bought a sportsbike may be to me. When something significant did happen, not being able to update that on my wall did make me feel a bit isolated and I almost cracked. (And for the record, I DID get myself a Ninja 650..in February) 

  4.       You realize just how un-important you are in the social media scheme of things

This one may not be true for everyone. Perhaps you have a friends list who would immediately notice your absence from the updates scene. But for an already sporadic FB user like me, my absence was hardly noticed. Actually, let me correct that. My absence HAS STILL not been noticed. Maybe one day, someone will be bored out of their mind enough to check my profile and ask me “Hey, why so silent?!!” But I won’t hold my breath :)

And there we have it. The PROs and the CONs I discovered of not being "actively" active on FB. As I said, I don’t plan on posting this on FB since I plan on keeping my exile going a bit more. At least until the day Whatsapps and Instagrams do not cure my social itch, and I have to return to FB again like a smoker who tried to get his fix chewing on those horrible nicotine tablets, but ultimately had to turn back to the cancer stick..!! :)

A Goodbye Letter to Gurgaon..!!

Dear Gurgaon,

Finally after three and a half years in your sometimes dusty, sometimes submerged, sometimes boiling, sometimes freezing, always aggressive embrace, I make my move back down south to Bengal…ur..erm… Bangalore (sounds more yoyo. And yoyo is better, as my colleagues have taught me).

Three and a half years is a good bit of time to get to know someone and learn from them. And you are one someone who has a LOT to teach..! Especially to those of us unfortunate enough to be bought up taught to be courteous and polite with everyone.

We started off on the wrong foot. You, the supposedly ultra-high class, brash, unforgiving mega-polis mistress; and me the middle-class, considerate and starry-eyed newbie trying to fit into your way of life. But at the end of our time together, I leave you, I believe, as a better individual. And although that is more a reflection on me rather than you, your role in that evolution is undisputable.

You taught me much. And when I refused to learn, you grabbed me by my neck and yanked me back in line. Er.. wait.. you don’t HAVE lines, or lanes or anything that has to do with order… you are a lawless, money buys all, irreverent……..umm..okay..this letter is starting to go all over the place.. a side effect of driving along your roads…! I apologise! Let me gather my thoughts for a second.

The purpose of my writing this letter to you is to thank you for teaching me a few key lessons. Lessons I will carry with me for life, for better or worse. They are listed below, and in no particular order of significance:

Sometimes you have to be the bigger a**hole:

Being polite and courteous to everyone by nature, this was the toughest and most important lesson you taught me. I not only learnt to be an a**hole, I also learnt how to turn up the a**holism to a higher level, thanks to a regular dose of driving amongst and interacting with the many enlightened beings who occupy your lands. I learnt to be very careful about who I was nice to - the paan chewing driver from Bihar in his battered Indica taxi one day, the smug, suited corporate in his Audi the next -  lest they screwed me over with a smile. For this, I thank you.

A vocabulary rich in incestuous insults:

 While I was quite fluent in South Indian swearing (which by the way gives one an excellent overview of human anatomy), you opened up a whole new dimension of insults, which initially made me cringe, but soon got incorporated into my vocabulary, particularly while driving amongst the a**holes mentioned above. For this, I thank you.

A re-affirmation that little droplets do make an ocean:

An ode to your rains. Enough said. Never will I underestimate a drizzle, and never will I feel comfortable when it rains. For this, I thank you.

Friends help you tolerate any place. Even hell:

During the many days I spent with you, I made friends. Good ones. Friends, who made me forget your vices for a while. Be it a cricket team full of rickety cricketers (me included). Be it colleagues who treat you like family. Be it distant acquaintances who pop up when you are in need and help you out. As someone who does not open up to new people very quickly, you taught me that the more good friends I make, the lesser I’ll feel the problems around me. For this, I thank you.

And perhaps most importantly

Too much of anything too soon, is bad:

Every time I read about you, the picture I got was of a street urchin who one day found a pot of gold. You got too rich, too soon. And as a result you spent like crazy, lost self-control and dived headlong into a consumption cess-pool. You grew a double chin and a potbelly. No problem! A couple of staples here, a nip and tuck there, and you soon hid your ungainly excesses. You got warts, and you got laser surgery. And so the story continues.. The lesson I learnt is that if I get rich overnight, I’d better plan out my life ten years ahead rather than get those farmhouses and Audis. For that, I thank you.

If this sounds more like a rant rather than a goodbye letter, I’m pretty sure you won’t give a damn. But as caustic as I sound, I leave you with more good memories than bad. And that is testament of the fact that despite all your vices, you still have a silver lining somewhere along your silhouette. I loved you in winter, despised you in summer, and just about got through the three days of rain every year.

We may never have met eye to eye, but what started out as awe, shock and helplessness (in that order) eventually evolved into acceptance. So much so that for a few fleeting seconds every other day, during moments which showed what you could be, instead of what you are, I felt proud to say I was, at least in my mind, a “Gurgaonite”. That I won’t ever be filthy rich enough to be one is a topic for another day!

Thank you for the memories Gurgaon!! And if we ever cross paths again, I hope you would have mellowed down with age, and would have finally become the sophisticated, classy and dainty madame you are painted to be..!!

For now, kalti maar raha hoon. GUR riddance to GAON rubbish..!!

What is LOVE anyway..??

To love is to suffer.

To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving.

Therefore to love is to suffer, and not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer.

To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer.

But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness.

I hope you're getting this down.,

(Courtesy Woody Allen)

Being the valentine’s month, I “propose” to write on LOVE; that “thing” which brings out the best and the worst in us. THING!!?? Read on..

Keeping things simple, the love I’m dealing with is just the simple boy-girl variety. (Or the boy-boy/girl-girl variety if that’s what gets your motor running). Passionate love, to be exact.

So what is love anyway?

In the slightly modified words of George Bernard Shaw:

“Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman/man and another” And I guess seasoned lovers (or married people) may find this true!

That may sound pretty unromantic, but as I went about my research on the topic (or googling, to the layman), I began to realize a pretty dampening truth.

As an emotion, Love is over-rated.

Fine…Slightly over-rated. Is that okay?

Now don’t get me wrong!! I’ve got nothing against love. I love love..!!

However,  the more I read, the more I found myself believing that “love”, is just a series of chemical reactions in the brain. The hastened heart-beat, the butterflies in the stomach feeling when we see that special someone, the sensation that they are in slow-motion...everything can be attributed the release of some chemical or the other into the brain..!!

In fact, one biological anthropologist even goes so far as to say that she can create love in a bottle if given the right chemicals..!! Boy THAT would be something I’d like to see!! I mean, making love in a bottle?? She’d need a pretty big bottle..!!

But getting back to the point I was making..

What was a natural arrangement required between males and females of the species to ensure human survival has now evolved/morphed into an emotion, so powerful that people can kill or die for it. Stories, poems, and legends about love have been recorded and celebrated by humans for generations. It is a widely held view that a life without experiencing love is not worth living. That the very essence of being human is the ability to love.

Strangely though, according to various studies, the part of the brain that is activated when you feel the rush of love is the same part which is activated by cocaine, or similar drugs..! And unlike normal drugs which take a while to affect and eventually draw the user in, love can take as little as one-fifth of a second to get a person hooked.

This got me thinking: So is love not an emotion? Is it a drug? A drug that humans have become hopelessly addicted to, through centuries of conditioning? “Love abuse” if I may call it that?

And when you think about it, The “Love” drug is so widely advertised/endorsed that no one escapes the urge to try it. The peer pressure to find it (nowadays starting even from primary school), is immense. It is socially unacceptable to avoid it. And once you get a sniff, you want more..!!

Maybe I’ll leave that question open… too many opinions out there..!! Do let me know if you have yours..

What I’ll try and do instead is acknowledge love and what it actually does - keep us going as a species - and break it down into phases. There is a natural progression to love or relationships. There are hundreds of theories out there. But I’m taking the liberty to summarize it into a simple progression, which I’ll call S-E-T. That’s Search, Emphasize and Tolerate.

Search:

Or the sex-drive. That insatiable neural itch that humans have all the time! If other members of the animal world have fixed mating cycles, humans have wayward mating super-bikes!! The sex-drive is what makes us actively look for partners to mate with; the raging hormones that tickle us every time those “special” Toms, Dicks or Harrys (or Marys, Janes and Lindas) flit into our sights.

This is the stage when we draw out our preferences. This gal? Niiicee..!! That guy? Naaaah..!! What about this one? Hmmm..!!?

Emphasize:

Or the courtship. The phase where we test out and focus on one option at a time. Finding common ground from where the next stage can begin. Often during this phase, we tend to emphasize more on the positives about our sweethearts. Negatives are swept under the carpet. The person takes a special meaning, and everything about them feels perfect. Everyone agrees this is the best phase of them all..!!

He’s so awesome; he hates wasting water. (Never mind that he bathes just once a week..!!)

She’s so cool; she’s really comfortable with my guy friends. (Never mind her drinking problem..!!)

He’s so sweet; he buys me anything I ask him. (Never mind he’s a drug dealer..!!)

You get the picture..

Tolerate:

Or the attachment. This stage normally comes after years of Searching and Emphasizing. You have gone through a reasonable number of options (either literally, or in your head). You have evaluated the negatives, and have finally locked on to the one person who you think you can live with, despite those negatives. You make the decision to finally be with him/her forever. Or at least tolerate long enough to produce off-springs and hopefully raise them well.

Depending on social pressures, some couples tolerate each other till they die (not counting those couples who actually like each other). Some separate after a fair bit of tolerating. And some break off relatively early, and begin the Search phase all over again. (Or if they have done their homework, start Emphasizing on option number 2).

The funny thing is, since we are all made so different, these three phases do not necessarily have to happen sequentially. Meaning some people can be in all three phases together!! They may have different names in their make-out, take-out and wait-out lists!!

However, depending on various inherent and external characteristics, the intensity of each phase may vary. So one person in the tolerate phase may block out the sex-drive altogether, while another person can skip the emphasize phase and jump right into toleration etc..

Okay, I’ve exceeded my word limit..!!. Gotta stop!!

So there you have it.. the three phases of love, in my limited understanding. And irrespective of which stage you are in, enjoy it..!!

READY? S-E-T? GO..!!

PS:  I had tried to replace the last letter of S-E-T with, X instead of T, you know, for a little bit of theater..!!

But Search, Emphasize and Xterminate did not seem to be the right sequence.. for the majority of us at least..!!

On a personal note, it’s my wedding anniversary this coming weekend..!! My wife’s been tolerating me for two years now!! And since I’m sure she’s going to read this sooner or later, HAPPY ANNIVERSARY BAYBE..!!

You know what they say: A man is not complete until he is married. Once married however, he is finished…!!

And so am I. With this month’s blog I mean..!!

Have a Happy Valentine’s week folks!! And like they say for Diwali & Holi, Play Safe!!

The Inception of the prelude to the preface..

“In word salad, alas drown I”

Odd name for a blog huh? Even more confusing when it’s all together like in the web page url:  inwordsaladalasdrowni.blogspot.in.. try that for a tongue twister..!!

Well if you know me, (which most probably you don’t) you may say it’s a fitting name for a blog by a guy who struggles to get his thoughts out in words lucidly unless he really makes an effort. I tend to talk incoherently and most often end up going round and round without actually getting to my point. Frustrating.. I know.. for you..!!

Confuse > Convince. That’s me I guess..!! Not a great self-endorsement, but hey, if anything, honest..

Enough about me though. Let me talk a little about myself now. Well, actually about why I’ve decided to join the blogwagon to be precise.

For a while now, I’ve come across blogs by various people, be it friends, colleagues, teachers, uncles, aunts, ex-girlfriend(s), old enemies.. (phew..who does NOT do this..??).

I’ve found myself reading them, sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a smirk.. and thinking to myself “Hey, this is a nice way to get people to listen to what I have to say.. Lemme at it..!!”

And Tadaaaa..!! the result is in front of you..!!

(okay.. you’ll get used to this if you keep reading my blogs...long sentence alert..!!)

But on my first attempt, when after about an hour or so of sitting down with a word doc, all I had were about 10 sentences, which, although nice-ish when read individually, bored and confused the hell out of me when I read them together, I found myself looking at all those blogs, which I read with a smirk, in a whole new different light..

The amount of thinking and work and editing the bloggers had to do to publish their blogs..!!

Those endless nights burning the midnight oil..!!

The struggle to make sure their words had the power to provoke thought, invoke introspection or just simply put a smile on people’s faces..!!

Or then again, maybe they did it in a flash.. Maybe I’m just slow..!!

Hold on.. let me get that smirk back in place.. Those grapes are sour..!!

So given my limited ability, I guess I need time. Time to get my thoughts together.  Time to express them with a semblance of clarity.

Clarity such that any layperson with inhuman patience, above average comprehension, and very low expectations can breeze through, and get what I’m saying.

And so, I begin my journey, promising myself that I will publish just one blog a month. Keeping in mind the energies it will demand of both me and the readers (if any)...

Now; knowing a few friends of mine, I’ll preempt a question I’ll get asked eventually..

Why do I want to put you through this? Well, I’ve been told I have a weird sense of humor. That my words are like a candy with a hard shell coating of sarcasm. But get through that shell, and I believe I do have some ability to connect with people and make them smile. And it’s something I want to share.

I may seem like all fun and games. But I do have opinions. And being an ultra-rational, unemotional and focused individual, (ooh.. I feel like John Rambo now..!!) I believe those opinions may benefit a small minority of my readers. I’ll put that minority estimate currently at about 1 in a 1000.

But then again, if that means I need to get a 1000 people to read my blog to make sure that YOU get any benefit out of it, I’ll say Good luck with that..!!

The topics I want to write about through 2014 have yet to find their place in my head. But as a thumb rule, I want to write about stuff which is close to my heart, and I’m comfortable with. At least that’s what Google tells me to do when I search for blogging tips..!

Fitness, Finance, Sports, Music and Business are the topics which rush to my mind (in no particular order..as always). I’ll probably be writing on those to start with. And the attempt will be to keep all the posts this sized so that neither me, nor my readers lose the plot.

So if any of those topics interest you, do gimme a try.

And if they don’t, well let me know what else would interest you. And I promise I’ll give it a shot. After all, I've got one month to kill it yeah?? 

So then, this is me, this is my blog, and if you get my drift, see you next month. Hopefully..!!

But before you go, hold on a minute.. How did I begin this again..?? Oh yeah.. the name..!!

In word salad, alas drown i…

Did I mention I chose it not because it sounded like my thoughts, but because it’s a palindrome..??

I’m sure you must’ve noticed it right at the beginning..

THAT was the point I was trying to make..!! Silly me..!!

Here’s to a good year..!!