Feeling orkutty!

After having cursed myself for long for not being as much productive in my routine life as I used to be, the other day I decided to compile a list of activities that eat up most of my day. To my surprise, the list was long enough to be considered for a thought and mostly included general time wasters; most prominent of which were sleeping long hours, net-surfing, watching movies & sitcoms, watching more movies & sitcoms, roaming around in market, listening to music and other trivial activities. Now the list is ready so it's time for making improvements. Being in a part of the world where in winter mercury dips as low as -8°C, weather doesn’t permit one to be stingy about their slumber hence a hibernation of twelve-thirteen odd hours in one go sounds reasonable for weekends. Give or take one-two hours for weekdays. Therefore the idea of making an adjustment to this habit of lying dormant eternally was out of question and totally against my motto of preserving the health of my brain (waking up early inflicts a severe damage to brain cells). Moving on to the next activity in the list – net surfing – I began dissecting it into several sub activities which included emailing, orkutting & facebooking, watching more movies online, downloading music, checking out blogs, news, friends’ photos etc etc.

Gotcha! I thought, the bull’s eye had been nailed down – “orkutting & facebooking”. Back in college days, when orkut was launched I recollect how I had dismissed it in a single glance as an awfully inefficient tool for communication purposes. After all, if one had to enquire about their friends’ whereabouts or assignments or the plan for next day why in the god's name would they put that query on a page called scrapbook as if the rest of the world was a sucker for whats and whens of this president-to-be’s life. Why not simply make a phone call or drop an email? Not only did it seem to me very illogical to have this sort of communication in a publicly visible page but also a very tiresome process considering one didn’t frequent websites like orkut on a daily basis and visits were made only when a notification of update was there in mailbox. Back then I visited orkut only to accept new friend requests or view scraps whose notifications were flooded into my mailbox by orkut servers. Once I was so ticked off by this flood of emails that I had even set up a mail filter to delete all the orkut emails. Not just me I expected the rest of world as well to despise orkut and deem it a time-waster. When someday the piled up notifications were to be cleared and orkut was to be opened in office, I ensured that orkut window was small in size so as not to be visible to many and readily minimizable. The matter had gone to an extent that once I and a colleague of mine went on to celebrate the near miss by a senior level manager who had almost caught us fooling around on orkut rather than working in our initial not-so-intrepid days at our maiden job.

But fate had something else in store. Having born in a period just before liberalisation of economy, one gets to spend their youth in a period of economic boom. Jobs are plenty and easy to get. Not only do they inflate the bank balance but some also present opportunities for overseas travel which any Indian IT geek would happily put as ‘on site’ perhaps accompanied by a big grin on their face. The twist – as I say it – begins here when one lands on site. Life takes a topsy-turvy turn especially when one is unmarried. In the initial few months, to say that one is on cloud nine would be an understatement because the pleasure of being in any place awash with superb food, plush infrastructure, comfortable transport, and natural beauty all around is immense. I experienced the same when I descended on Queen's land a few months ago. The initial two-three months go by like a matter of minutes when one is checking out all newly opened up vistas – markets, restaurants, museums, castles, beaches, islands, culture, art, people and what not. Post this come the days when the eyes open up to reality and one realises that not much is left to explore in the vicinity and this is when one marries their laptop. These are the days when after finishing all the chores of the day from sleeping, working, lunching, roaming around in markets to watching TV, all that remains in your room is you and your laptop; you staring at the laptop and the laptop glaring at you. It appears like a marriage continuing from previous life and to be continued for the coming seven lives. The marriage with machine also nurtures the love for orkut and facebook. This is when the dislike for orkut mutates like melting butter into an intense feeling of heavenly love between two separated souls. This is when scrapbook doesn't seem that bad a thing. This is when one loves to visit orkut on a daily basis or rather hourly basis to be precise. This is when one knows about the new scraps in their scrapbook even before the orkut server delivers the notification email to their mailbox. This is when one always appears in the list of top nine people who are online on orkut home page.

Orkut is doing an excellent job after all. To check the whereabouts of a friend in the friend list one doesn't even need to check out their profile. 'Oh! She appears on the home page of orkut all day so she must be on site and vice versa!' - is something that can be assumed safely, in my opinion. Besides scrapbook, orkut has added some terrific features of late e.g. status updates (pinched from facebook/twitter), photo sharing, video sharing, custom apps. Now it provides myriad possibilities for time killing. That day I played teen patti with some of my geographically distributed friends. If that is not enough, just upload an interesting or controversial photo on orkut and wait for comments from all the lovable friends and here you kill another three-four hours in discussing a world-altering affair. Legion other possibilities lurk there in Apps folder. Orkut must be praised for making time-killing as easy as a pie for those desperate to kill time. From an inefficient communication tool Orkut has brilliantly transformed itself into an experience sharing platform. Such plus points apart, it gives a feeling of connectedness with those miles away. For instance take status updates, using which one can easily avoid becoming Id ka chaand among their friends by regularly putting not-so-revolutionary platitudes in there. Who cares if they were copied from a website called quotes of the day dot com. You never realise how easily the time goes by once you login into this time devouring boredom gobbling blue monster which beats even black hole as in the black hole can consume only light but orkut can consume light as well as time. Lately, observing how much I use it, I have started believing that ten percent of the traffic to Orkut must be originating from my machine. Kudos to Orkut for being a friend in need. Keep it up Orkut team!!

Coming back to my original point of making my life more productive by kicking out Orkut/facebook or new found love twitter from my schedule of activities; this idea doesn't seem to be eligible for further consideration at all. Movies, music and sitcoms are equally, if not more, inseparable from me as orkut is. So, I will kill some brain cells instead. I must hold off blogging now and login into orkut as I am feeling orkutty again. Oops did I update that in my status?!