Social Not-working

Online social networking-is it really social?

Global technological advancement happing in the world today encompasses enormous power, providing us various opportunities to bring about radical changes. A revolution in communication, Social networking is one such innovation that is bringing about unprecedented changes in our social behavior. Social networking is boom to an extend where we get to interact with far off people, whom we never could have interacted otherwise and spreading our word to the mass. It is a source of vast untapped potential and, if would  be leveraged effectively, could provide us with insurmountable options and opportunities in each and every section of our lives. 

Viral nature of the social networking platforms inherits massive potential to advertising our content to the public and corporate firms know how to make best use of this cache of opportunities. Internet marketing is getting a whole new definition where businesses are now finding word-of-mouse publicity much more effective and efficient than word-of-mouth publicity.

Now companies are also focusing on ‘crowd sourcing’ where instead of just couple of perspectives, they are harnessing the power of millions different ideas through the means of online platforms. Social networking has the capacity to revolutionize the current social structure in a way we’ve never seen before. But are we using all the capability been provided to use in the best possible way? 

“A mobile phone in your pocket right now has more computing power than all of NASA had in 1969.…NASA launched a man to the moon and what do WE do?…..We launch a bird into pigs”@moskovich. Social networking is one such example which lay among us heap of opportunities to make world a smaller place to live and bring people closer. But colossal source of power if not channeled in the right direction could be devastating as well. As we are getting more addicted to this astonishing innovation, slowly we are creating ourselves a nihilistic virtual world, in which our very existence would become pointless. So the question we now pose is does online social networking is really making us more social? 

Creating a virtual image of ourselves, bragging it with much of the fake information and when done with that, keep peeping into other’s phoney life…..we feel so social when our whole image online is nothing but just some electrical charges given a fancy visual shape and color. Burying ourselves deep into myriad of electronic gadgets, we have carefully constructed ourselves a closed garden, much like a sim-city, where our whole identity has taken a shape of electronic signals. We feel more secure and harmless interacting with each other through that media but…it do lack one of the most basic and important ingredient which makes us very human.

Social networking is slowly taking over face-to-face communication, as people prefer expressing themselves online. Communication has become rapid, but at the cost of personal interaction. You can just talk to someone over internet for years but that would still not be compared to sitting in front of that person and not saying a word. Feelings expressed in a hand written note can never be translated through emoticons : | ....These online sites, though, are powerful as they help us to manage and map out our relationships, but too much obsession has thrown us away from its very purpose- we interact but do we really connect?!! 

Now all we do is broadcast our personalities online by publishing thoughts, photos and videos…and then expect people to respond and acclaim it. This continuous self-promotion and then incessant need of public acceptance to our every action is shadowing the sole purpose of social networking......The rush of nostalgia when you find an old friend on ‘Facebook’ can be quite heady and exciting. But we’ve moved a long way to those feelings and now all we crave for is comments & applaud on everything we do, by everyone we know, to keep feeding into this abysmal hunger of elevating our self-esteem in the society.  

Social networking has already penetrated deep into our lives, accepting that is completely on one’s wish. With more than 1 billion users, now every 6th individual on this planet has an account on ‘facebook’ which clearly shows how social networking sites have proliferated nearly every nook and cranny of our lives. 

Power of social networking is still untamed and need to be cultivated to reap more benefits. With world entering into 21st century, we are also ushering ourselves into the amazing era of prosperity and development where power of social networking is going to be unlimited, restricted only by one’s imagination and efforts. Till then social networking sites are just an unexploded ticking time bomb, waiting to go off. Will it refurbish or destroy our society, that only time will tell.

 

Two-face nation

 When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the Batman series and its villains scare the hell out of me. You must be more familiar with the batman through the recent blockbuster movies, but I was a big fan of batman through comics and cartoon show on TV much before.  A little kid horrified with his parents’ death, inherits his father’s huge empire and decides to fight crime on his own without following any law. I was most captivated by the enemies of the Batman,….like scarecrow who uses some toxin on his victims to exaggerate their paranoia and bring their phobias to life and the joker, a psychopathic clown.  But out of these outlandish super-villains, the one who intrigues me the most is the ‘Two-Face’-once a clean cut attorney, now a person with dual personality who decides to bring about good or evil based upon the outcome of a coin flip.

Having discussion with my friend the other day on what India has become now in the midst of this economic and political turmoil all around the world, strangely this image of the ‘Two-Face’ popped up in my head.  There is no doubt that with globalization, India has ushered itself into the amazing era of prosperity and development,…but with disrupted politics and other unsorted social issues getting in the way, I believe India has become a two faced country now. All countries have little bit of good and little bit of bad, but India has reached to the extremes of both ends.

It is very usual to see in the same news update, a report like,…India having the highest number of homeless people in the world and in the next news, Mukesh Ambani, an Indian industrialist owning the most expensive home in the world, costing more than entire GDP on many countries. These differences have grown so big now that it’s hard to remember it is a same country.…..One side of it would sometimes make you wanna rip your brains out and smash yourself to death with it, and the other side,….how the British would say “would tickle your fancy” (try to say that with a British accent)!

With world entering into 21^st century, globalization has got a new definition. We are now seeing the commencement of a whole new era, with huge advancement in communication and technology.  World has now not only became smaller but it has shrunken to tiny. In his novel  ‘The World is Flat’, Thomas L. Friedman  talks about how the world has become flat now and with new innovations and collaboration between companies and people, a new India has emerged which is at level with other western countries. I am definitely in consent with this and believe that a new face of India is emerging with fancy restaurants, eight lane freeways, and tall buildings sprouting up like weeds each month. Sitting in McDonalds under my office, which now serves a breakfast menu for caffeine junkie generation,  I see people, all of them with dangling ID badges around their neck, driving through their big cars, getting in or out of tall glass buildings which are all around. No, this definitely wasn’t America. It didn’t even seem like India. I can only call it a ‘New India’. But what I forgot is that, there is another side of it.

When you live with your parents, the world seems beautiful. For the first time when I left my parents house, I woke up to the realization that there is another side of India which is not as beautiful…..For the start, I always knew but never realised that India is so close to the equator : / .…..Looking at the things through the other side of the window, all my theories of new, modernized and globalized India seem to go down the drain. Then it did strike me that there is still a part of our country which hasn’t taken even a single step forward however, few steps backward.  In this new competitive flat world, some are still living below the ground…..Even though this two face India has provide us with new opportunities, new partners…it also entails new challenges and new dangers. Coming from the generation of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories, the generation that not only imagine better future but also acts on that,……I refuse to live in fear of the Two-face, the way I have spend most of my childhood. May be in future I will get some courage and inspiration to eliminate these two faces and bring up the one clean new nation………….but for now my only advice would be…stay as far as possible on the other side!!

Masterplan

Do we control our destiny, or do unseen forces manipulate us?

One day on a winter morning, I passed by my school while walking to the market. It was 10:00 but sun wasn’t quite visible yet and it was all foggy.  The chilly breeze was making me shiver even in my fat jacket……I stopped for a while to peep through the gate and it reminds me of a time in school. Me chatting with my best friends and sipping through a coffee… Sharing every bit of ourselves and laughing on the stupid stuff. This is all what we do the whole day and we couldn’t wait to meet each other the next morning to do all that again....Back in those days, that was all I ever wanted and I wanted to preserve it forever and tried my best to do that…but still the things did not turn out the way I planned?

There are many times in life when I had a little glimpse of the future fate has planned for me and I realized I want something else……Few times instead of accepting predetermined path I decided to act shrewdly and defy fate. No matter how hard I tried….life always threw me back to the place I was meant to be….. Even thought I always put relentless effort to plan my course of action, still some decisions lead me to good and some lead me to bad, but now I believe that it all is just a part of the Masterplan.

Some of my worst decisions have lead me to the best things in my life and many of my rational decisions have made me cry. So is it worth to plan all the time when now we know that all it take is a mere spin of destiny and you will end up in a situation which you could have never imagined….I never used to believe in destiny and thought of it as a fiction, used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men and justify their own defeat. You know like how people always blame their failures and others success on destiny…….But after dancing to the tune of life for a long time, I have decided to change my mind.

Why the ones we love the most drift away, even though we try our best to hold them?....How do we lead to our best friends in life?....I never planned them and yet they happened. Discern it as much as possible but life won’t ever let you understand the reason behind……We are like a boat in a Youthful river. Paddle as hard as possible but we still drift with the flow. This force of life is what leads us to everything….. It doesn’t mean to stop paddling. Give your best shot and let the nature do its course. May be the river will lead you in a direction where you really wanna go.

But who governs our fate anyway? There could be forces in the universe which we haven’t discovered yet that controls us…..There must be some driving force or some power, which steers me to things which I have never planned to achieve,...or drifts me away from the ones I loved and always wanted to have. It doesn’t matter to me what’s written in my Masterplan, but the answer I am most desperate for is…..only if I ever could, how can I change it to the way I want?

P.S.: Guys if you haven’t yet,….check out my previous posts too, read it and if you like it, drop a comment and if you don’t like it, keep it to yourself…….or drop me an email. Why does anybody else need to know about it? Right?....... Just kidding! I want you to speak your heart out when you comment.

       

Moving on

"Be careful what you wish for...'cause you just might get it all.............and then some you don't want!!"

Almost all of us sometimes think about the good times we have spent in the past…..those best days of our lives which we wanna live again and again, and will still never get enough of it. Surely we want to get back in time and live those moments again....If you don’t find anything interesting in your past to remember it by,…..start creating them right now. Life is full of good bad times, create some and experience the exhilaration of this roller coaster ride called life.

Anyway, we all have some good old memories we cherish. It could be of the high school, where all the things happen for the first time.…Bunking class just to chat, movies with friends and most importantly, first crush. Or it could of the college, where all these same things happen again, but in full extreme. Bunking every alternate class, going to movies we don’t even know the name of and first crush becomes forever love….. For me School was all about “How to”. All my energy was focused on how to get good marks in exams, how to make my parents proud, how to talk to that girl in the class and how to get into a good college… After getting into the college, I made a conscious effort to stop indulging into any kind of cerebral exercise and now it all becomes about "How not to". All of my energy was focusing on…..how not to flunk the exams, how not to get caught when I lie to my parents and.....how not to get dumped!!

I do not have any doubt that my best time was college. While in college, I wished to get over with it soon and start with my professional life. Now when I too have joined the rat race and became a Naukri-wala…. I think about the time I have spent in college. I miss knocking myself out in the middle of the week not worrying about tomorrow, wearing different football club jerseys every other day for which I could have been killed anywhere in Europe, chatting till three at night and staying half asleep in the class... and many things like that which are now long gone.........Office seems to be full of pot-bellied bald guys, wearing black leather formal shoes with the denim jeans, having espresso every hour just to keep their eyes wide open and saving themselves from falling asleep on their laptops, which if would break, would cost them their whole month of 9 to 6 job. If you want to see how the world would look like if apocalypse would ever happen and everybody turns into a zombie…my office gives you the best picture….and for that matter any office…..One more thing which terribly sucks is to tell people that I am no longer a student. People expect a lot of money from you which you do not really have. Earlier I used to easily save myself from police walas with even `20… but now that they know that I am working in a big corporate, they expect a big bribe.

I remember college as being extreme…extremely ambitious as well as extremely crazy!!. All of that was in the past and has left some really great memories. Could be school, college or some other times, but we all have some pleasant memories of our past. It’s sometimes good to take little time out of our busy lives and think about it. This will definitely bring a smile on your face.  But, life is all about moving on and creating lot more beautiful memories like these which we would cherish in future.

Why do I love her?

"All I know is that, I know nothing!!"

I look up in the sky a lot and think about this incredible universe and the forces or powers controlling it. It’s amazing how the universe encompasses so many stars, planets, meteoroids and so many other things we don’t even know about. I read a lot about Black Holes, The Big Bang Theory and always yearn for more. Black hole is believed to have so much of gravitational force that even the light which falls on it cannot reflect back. That is why it appears to be like a black hole. You might wonder how can we possibly find a Black Hole in the universe if we cannot see one?....We can detect the presence of the black hole if we find some planets or stars revolving around a dark spot, like the planets revolve around sun. A Black Hole could me billion times smaller than sun but with gravitation force billion times greater than sun. None was ever found though. Black hole is still just a hypothesis....Also many scientists believe that one possible way to do time travel is passing through a black hole.

Universe seems infinite and I believe nobody can ever understand its nature, but there is one more thing which stupefies me even more……Human being and its interpersonal attractions. We are so complex…..and the way our brain works sometimes dazzles me.

I believe I can answer a lot of questions or either comment on most of them. Ask me the name of our vice-president, the capital city of Brazil (it’s not Rio de Janeiro), the day America got independence or the revenue of the world’s top ten companies, but the question I don’t have even the slightest idea of is “why do I love her?”.  A question like this seems pretty simple but I never find any answer. I can never possibly understand the way our brain works. All logics crash when it comes to interpersonal attraction and some other forces start to work. Conventional Laws of attraction doesn't help. So what do we do if we ever get stuck in situation with questions like this all around us?…....I say run…run away, as far as possible and run fast!

Knowledge is very important and from the beginning of our life, everybody stresses upon us to learn more and more about the world around us. From school to college we grill ourselves to understand this incredible universe and all that it includes. We think we are doing pretty fine and might someday become a scientist or a doctor and will know all about the world, and beyond,…..till the time we turn fifteen. Suddenly we find ourselves overwhelmed with totally different kind of questions like............why do I miss this girl when she is not around,...do I love her, why I am jealous, and does she love me too? After struggling with these questions for few years we learn a new lesson in life that not knowing something is often more comfortable than knowing it. It's rather better to let yourself flow with these feelings than to figure out the reason behind and deal with it rationally.…..I always wanted and still want to discern the universe but when it comes to understanding interpersonal attraction, I would say “ignorance is bliss”.

DB Cooper

It’s a basic human mentality that we carve even more, to know about the things which we possibly can’t find answer for. Scientists believe that this is the reason why we have evolved so much and rose above all other species. We stop at nothing and keep looking for answers which seems beyond our reach. But apparently, eventually we get the answers too. In the 14^th and 15^th century many of the curious renaissance scientists must have look up in the sky and asked questions, answers to which has lead us to know all about universe. We just need to think from a broad perspective and ask ourselves all sorts of questions. Isaac Newton was not just looking up in the sky, but he was looking into the vast universe with billions and billions of stars and planet, when he saw an apple falling from a tree. He wondered, out of whole universe why this apple came back to the earth and generalized theory of gravitation. So why do we restrict ourselves. Why do we keep looking through the window when we can open the whole damn door and get outside? 

Again, there are so many interesting and unexplored mysteries to talk about. Is there life on any other planet in the universe? Is time travel possible?......If you say no, Albert Einstein would like to disagree...Anyway, all this sounds too big. Let me share with you one interesting popular mystery I read the other day about, on the internet. “Mystery about DB Cooper” is one of the biggest mysteries of all time and the only unsolved plane Hijack incident ever in the History. This guy alone hijacked an American Boeing 727 in 1971. He asked for $200,000 in ransom in the form of $20 bills and four parachutes. Money provided to him was marked so that whenever he makes any transaction with this money, he will get caught. After getting this stuff, Cooper than ordered pilot to fly towards Mexico. Immediately two fighter jets started following this plane. Just 20 minutes after the take off, he jumped out of the plane with two parachutes and bag full of money.

This incident is then followed by world’s most expensive and long manhunt. But till date nobody could ever find DB Cooper, neither any traces of the parachutes he jumped with. No transaction was also made with that money. Nine years after this incident, an eight year old kid found a bundle of money near Columbia River around the area where DB Cooper had jumped. That money was confirmed to be the part of one provide as ransom to DB Cooper. Since then many conjectures have been put forth by FBI and other agencies about what could have happened to DB Cooper but none was proved true. Surviving after jumping from such a great height, with huge weight on the back seems unlikely to many. But then where is rest of the money and parachutes? Also many have claimed to know DB Cooper long after the incident. For instance, wife of Duane Weber, told FBI that three days before the death of her husband, he told her that he is DB cooper. She also told that, her husband took her to a picnic near Columbia River sometime in 1979, around the same time when that kid found a pack of ransom money near the river. Duane Weber also suffers through a knee injury which possibly could be due to the jump from an airplane. This is just one of the many claims made. Internet is inundated with DB Cooper.

Interesting isn’t it? So let’s unravel another one of the mystery. To begin with, why don’t we start with ourselves? There is so much we do not know about ourselves. Like what we want out of life, what we really want to achieve, what kind of person we are and what kind of person we want to be with. I am sure you will figure out something new about yourself if you ask these questions. A new thought will pop up in your head and you will realize that this is something you never knew. But we are so complicated and fickle minded that this exercise could take a while. However this long pursuit to find yourself and the bits which we learn in the process to do that is much more interesting than the final result. Nobody would have been interested in the story about DB Cooper if he would have been found.....So hop on and start exploring. Finding yourself is no different than finding DB Cooper, except that DB Cooper might never be found.  

Looking Back

I’ve been having too many thoughts in my head lately and I needed to get them out. So...what is a better way than to put it on internet and share it with the whole world…except North Korea though? People are not allowed to access internet in that country.  Bad for them but there is nothing we can do about it. All we can do is wait for the USA to get annoyed by their weird secrecy or intimidate buy their growing military power and attack them.  May be than those people get some relief… But again, getting attacked by USA is not that comforting too. We all have seen Wikileaks cables on Afghanistan……I think those people are fucked both ways.

Anyways, let me start with my first blog….

On one nice Saturday afternoon I was walking down the inner circle of Connaught Place hoping to buy a nice pair of sports shoes for myself. I did not have much time for this because I needed to run few more important errands that day. I parked my car in front of the PVR plaza and started circling around. CP has almost all the top brands available in this country.

I checked out all the good stores in my way but didn’t buy anything because I was always expecting to get a better deal in the next store. I wanted to check out all the options and pick up the best one out of all. So I kept on moving from one store to another, anticipating to get something better in the next one.What I was actually looking for is something similar to a pair of Nike sneakers I saw the other day in the same market. Those felt perfect but were way out of my budget. So, I was really hoping to get something exactly like that in a cheaper brand or may be 90% discount on those ones.

After a while I realized that I have come back to the same place from where I’ve started, with a McVeggi burger in my one hand and a coke in another and I’ve lost some of my very precious time….Looking back in time I realized this is what my whole life has been. I have let go so many good things in my life just waiting to have a better one and spend my whole life chasing something, which was way too far.  I guess you cannot chase a car sitting on a bicycle. Get a car or chase other bicycles….I can only wish to live those times once again but, I guess this cannot happen with life.

So after finishing my meal, I decided to start it all over again but this time doing things much more smartly and grab the opportunity without luring myself for the better one. And also, to have my next burger only after I finish off with my shopping…..I could only afford an Aloo Tikki burger with no coke after buying my shoes but trust me, this still tastes much better than my previous meal.