The meaning of the term 'shooting in the dark' can perhaps be adequately expressed by the analogy of a person swatting mosquitoes in the darkness. But log into a Yahoo or MSN chatroom, and I can better illustrate for you what 'shooting in the dark' means.
Your magic letters: ASL. Age, sex, location. Best described in Hindi as haath maarna, for long, ASL was the first step towards what millions had convinced themselves as the only way to land a mate.
The first time I was prompted with ASL, I replied, "18, male, Mumbai."
I did not hear from that person again.
The sixteenth time someone asked me my ASL, I replied, "23, female, Texas". That's when things got rolling.
Less women. Too many men. And wouldn't you admit it today — you always wanted to sign into the rooms that had more women. You couldn't be sure, right? After all, those were the days of anonymity — user names ranged from hotguy_1999, incestuous_pest211, ladiesman420, rockyhrithik_kahona, tallboy_96 and cutegirl_looking_hot. Finding a female user in a chatroom was like catching a goldfish in the Sunderbans.
Everybody's username described everything they weren't (or maybe they were), but the element of suspicion added to the fun of being inside chatrooms. Lecherous men were keen to 'get chatty' and take their conversation into a private chatroom where falling rose petals and flying hearts would add to the sensorial experience of exchanging LOLs, btw, ROFLs and smileys. And embarrassed at the absence of a really good-looking display picture for yourself, you sought relief in Yahoo's 'avatars' which had the magical abilities to help even the ugly frustrated cyber cafe customer pose as cool dude.
If you were in a cyber cafe, the 'tring' of Yahoo's chat messenger would punctuate the air non-stop. You'd look in envy at the workstation where the maximum number of trings came from.
Psychologically, there was a high in making 'chat friends'. It made you known as someone who'd breached the distance barrier and achieved something — something which till then only Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan had achieved in You've Got Mail.
It would allow you to tell the whole world about your 'chat friendship', a newspaper would quote you for a story on how the internet meant the demise of distance, and a rather unremarkable film about your remarkable success in the online world would be titled Dil Hi Dil Mein, starring Sonali Bendre.
Your chatroom life would become a topic of water cooler conversations. Stories like 'they met through internet and the guy turned out to be an old man!', 'she's actually much fatter than she appears online', and even stuff like 'he doesn't dig his nose when he's online'. Barkha Dutt would congregate an episode of 'We The People' inviting ashen-faced parents, worried school principals and rebellious students on how the internet was full of suspicious men, sitting in smelly, smoke-filled cyber-cafes. The discussion would be a turn-off for most women, who would swear they went online only to email their CV. A little disappointed, you would continue visiting chatrooms, but not with the same fervour.
That's when feelers of the social networking revolution would begin. A strange mail would enter your inbox, titled 'Monica Mehta added you on hi5'. Tempted by the sound of her name and the look of her profile, you'd suddenly realise that now friendships could be 'requested for'! As easy as requesting for a duplicate phone bill.
Search. Contemplate. Add. The first nail in the coffin of ASL. The new websites for the voyeur generation — Hi5, Orkut, Facebook — didn't give you a reason to ask for those details. The chatroom needed air-conditioning, for it was beginning to feel the heat.
Not to be disappointed, you would work towards creating a really good profile on these websites. Archeologists of the future will record this as 'the display picture dilemma'. 'If she has a flower as a display picture, she is not pretty and hesitant to show herself', 'If he has Salman Khan as a profile picture, he must be too ugly to show himself'. You would then try to attract everyone's attention by typing your name LiKe ThIs To EvErYoNe WhO mAtTeReD thinking it is so cool. When people remained unimpressed, you'd try out the next sensation to hit the web. Twitter, a medium for 140-character updates where users are allowed to do things which civilised society does not. e.g. 'follow' others.
Since your tweets would tell a lot more about you, you try to tell the whole world about everything happening in your life, in your body, inside your trousers and in your head, hoping that someone is listening. Occasionally, someone would respond to your tweets. And when they don't, you get this feeling of déjà vu. Years after having abandoned the chatroom, you realise you're shooting in the dark all over again.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment