In the early nineties, when we still had haircut hangovers from the 80s (you know the fluffy puff styles with handbands to keep the downy strands from your eyes), my friend Jamie lost his fat cat. He had a rather pretty cat. It wasn’t Persian, nor was it Siamese nor a Mongolian descendant of Chengis Khan’s surviving pet farm. The Mongol threw pet elephants from hills for fun. His cats made it alive because they could land on their feet even after a huge fall. Most of them became lame cats.
Anyway, Jamie’s cat wasn’t from this majestic lineage. His cat was your usual suburban Pune feline whose parents prowled my Bavdhan neighbourhood, ruled by society president Shrisvastava. They managed to enter homes of people who kept their windows and ventilators closed.
One April morning Jamie came to me and banged on my door. I thought, as usual, he had come for the newspapers. When I opened the door he looked like he had been semi-electrocuted. "Man, my cat’s vanished. I think that high caste bastard got rid of him because Ginger had been pooing on doormats. What do I do now?" I could not say much. Since I was re-reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, I borrowed a line to show my consideration. I put my hand on his shoulders and said, "There, there."
The news of the missing feline zipped across the student-heavy neighbourhood like a present-day bomb hoax. All the guys gathered and we started Operation Soft Ginger. All outstation students, Maharashtrian and non-Maharashtrian, combed the neighbourhood for Ginger. The best thing was that the guys and gals did not have much to do. They were reading, arguing, getting drunk in the afternoon or trying out illegal stuff. It was easy for them to drop their engagements because they were living life -- really. Finding a cat was something that people living a real life did.
We found Ginger lolling around on a mound of sand with a goat for company, three blocks down from the building where me and Jamie lived. It did not strike us that fat Ginger was still too fast for the forever angry red-faced king of the society.
Now, fast forward to circa 2008. Life is not the same. We have a recession and we haven’t the faintest idea why it is happening, though we pretend to know all about it in flimsy conversations during society parties, where women wear shiny stuff on their eyelids and look like pit vipers, and the guys look like ironed hyenas.
Last week, a college student living in our society in Panchvati lost his cat. It was Persian I am told. However, it was never found because nobody combed the area. Probably, the cat may have come home by now. Nobody knows really. A little boy, who I’ll call Pravin (his hand is frozen in the mouse-hold grip, his fingers can only double click and hold forks) told me that he ran a search on eBay and YouTube but the cat wasn’t there. The college student spoke to everyone he knew in the area on Skype, but nobody had seen anything because nobody needed to step out that much anymore. People tried locating the expensive cat with Google Earth, made queries on webchats and left status messages that read ‘looking 4 a Psian ct’.
That incident made me make this entry in my digital diary:
Am online 2 lng dis days. And it is showing in the way I write. I know a few people, some of them my co-workers, who can’t spell on account of web addiction. Chat is turning into a professional hazard because we thrive on knowing spellings a bit better than others.
Internet is like drugs or alcohol. The virulence of addiction varies and there are no real benchmarks. For instance, Irvine Welsh’s character from Trainspotting, Mother Superior, never fell to heroin despite the length of his abuse and the prodigious amounts he consumed. Conversely, the writer F Fitzgerald Scott was an alcoholic though just two glasses of champagne were toxic for him, as his friend Ernest Hemingway found out. I get withdrawal symptoms if I am away from the web for a week. Most folks feel depressed if they are away for even half a day.
One of the most prominent signs of internet addiction is waking up in a huff at night because you heard a ‘ping’ in your head. That happens to me often. I am a bonafide pingaphrenic. It is like schizophrenia because the symptoms of internet addiction have schizoid qualities about it. A person suffering from full blown pingaphrenia feels suspicious that people who don’t reply to his/her friend request within ten minutes have ignored the request. Pingaprenics fail to understand that people are not online 24/7, that the ‘green button’ status is not the revelation that guys like Descartes were looking for. They don’t not know that ‘I am online, therefore I am’ is a fallacy.
(PS: My friend Baroon Mahanta also pointed out to me that we talk only on Gtalk despite living in the same city at a distance of only 10 km max. We haven’t seen each other since college!)
Anyway, Jamie’s cat wasn’t from this majestic lineage. His cat was your usual suburban Pune feline whose parents prowled my Bavdhan neighbourhood, ruled by society president Shrisvastava. They managed to enter homes of people who kept their windows and ventilators closed.
One April morning Jamie came to me and banged on my door. I thought, as usual, he had come for the newspapers. When I opened the door he looked like he had been semi-electrocuted. "Man, my cat’s vanished. I think that high caste bastard got rid of him because Ginger had been pooing on doormats. What do I do now?" I could not say much. Since I was re-reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, I borrowed a line to show my consideration. I put my hand on his shoulders and said, "There, there."
The news of the missing feline zipped across the student-heavy neighbourhood like a present-day bomb hoax. All the guys gathered and we started Operation Soft Ginger. All outstation students, Maharashtrian and non-Maharashtrian, combed the neighbourhood for Ginger. The best thing was that the guys and gals did not have much to do. They were reading, arguing, getting drunk in the afternoon or trying out illegal stuff. It was easy for them to drop their engagements because they were living life -- really. Finding a cat was something that people living a real life did.
We found Ginger lolling around on a mound of sand with a goat for company, three blocks down from the building where me and Jamie lived. It did not strike us that fat Ginger was still too fast for the forever angry red-faced king of the society.
Now, fast forward to circa 2008. Life is not the same. We have a recession and we haven’t the faintest idea why it is happening, though we pretend to know all about it in flimsy conversations during society parties, where women wear shiny stuff on their eyelids and look like pit vipers, and the guys look like ironed hyenas.
Last week, a college student living in our society in Panchvati lost his cat. It was Persian I am told. However, it was never found because nobody combed the area. Probably, the cat may have come home by now. Nobody knows really. A little boy, who I’ll call Pravin (his hand is frozen in the mouse-hold grip, his fingers can only double click and hold forks) told me that he ran a search on eBay and YouTube but the cat wasn’t there. The college student spoke to everyone he knew in the area on Skype, but nobody had seen anything because nobody needed to step out that much anymore. People tried locating the expensive cat with Google Earth, made queries on webchats and left status messages that read ‘looking 4 a Psian ct’.
That incident made me make this entry in my digital diary:
Am online 2 lng dis days. And it is showing in the way I write. I know a few people, some of them my co-workers, who can’t spell on account of web addiction. Chat is turning into a professional hazard because we thrive on knowing spellings a bit better than others.
Internet is like drugs or alcohol. The virulence of addiction varies and there are no real benchmarks. For instance, Irvine Welsh’s character from Trainspotting, Mother Superior, never fell to heroin despite the length of his abuse and the prodigious amounts he consumed. Conversely, the writer F Fitzgerald Scott was an alcoholic though just two glasses of champagne were toxic for him, as his friend Ernest Hemingway found out. I get withdrawal symptoms if I am away from the web for a week. Most folks feel depressed if they are away for even half a day.
One of the most prominent signs of internet addiction is waking up in a huff at night because you heard a ‘ping’ in your head. That happens to me often. I am a bonafide pingaphrenic. It is like schizophrenia because the symptoms of internet addiction have schizoid qualities about it. A person suffering from full blown pingaphrenia feels suspicious that people who don’t reply to his/her friend request within ten minutes have ignored the request. Pingaprenics fail to understand that people are not online 24/7, that the ‘green button’ status is not the revelation that guys like Descartes were looking for. They don’t not know that ‘I am online, therefore I am’ is a fallacy.
(PS: My friend Baroon Mahanta also pointed out to me that we talk only on Gtalk despite living in the same city at a distance of only 10 km max. We haven’t seen each other since college!)
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