The F-World
(Published in First City magazine, May 2013)
There was a time not so long ago, when I became a Facebook widow. ‘What was it like?’, you ask.
Brief, I say.
All it took for my Husband-in-FB-rehab to come back from the dead, was a quick click on ‘Get Back’, and lo behold, I was saubhagyawati again.
My husband has a healthy relationship with his Facebook addiction. He hurtles through regular cycles that go from ‘FB-Overdose’ to ‘Only 3 Minutes FB per day’ and back. I, on the other hand, am a Facebook junkie, especially when deadlines for this column are whooshing past. I treat it like an extra limb, my finger forever poised over the f key, my password autofed and my access as easy as two quick stabs at Enter. When I’m not on FB, I experience typical de-addiction moments: restlessness of the insane order, itching need to give into just-one-more-time cravings, super remorse at spending an entire day sniffing up my addiction again.
You know how the foundation of our past has always been about before and after? Before Christ and After Christ. Before Puberty and After Puberty. Before Cable TV and After MTV. Then came Google and the history of our memory function was written anew as Pre Google and Post Google. And even though I meet at least person per fortnight who says, ‘I’m not on Facebook ya,’ we all know that in this tiny world of Dilli, conversations are going from Pre-Facebook to Post-Facebook. We are pre-empting, posing, pretending, parading, perhaps sometimes wondering why we can’t simply end a conversation with a Like button, post a comment and run away, own anything quickly by posting a smug, head-tilted, hand-on-waist photograph clicked in front of it.
In a post-Facebook world, everything is overlapping so quickly, I’m wondering if a couple of years later I’ll be telling my kids bedtime fables about how once upon a time Facebook was just a website. It’s the hard, persistent truth: some little twiggy bits of my DNA have forever been altered in the FB aftermath. It’s happening to me even as I type and snoop around Facebook for the gazillionth time since I started. For one, earthshattering import is recording on my language and brain functions; innocuous words such as ‘Like’, ‘Friends’, ‘Privacy’, ‘Complicated’ have been altered forever in meaning. Other words are rapidly losing their previous reading-resonance: ossam has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, nyc nothing to do with New York City, anything greater than 3 can be love. Neighbour aunties are losing the battle to Facebook when it comes to wheedling out juicy gossip (‘How are you feeling today?’), insecurity-inducing tactics ('You added 2 friends this month.' 'Your friends added 1066 friends.' ‘Your Husband added friends you may know’), and engineering misgivings (when clicking on ‘Help a Friend’ leads to your mother’s profile page).
My online life is more often than not, like a rotten party I go to all the time, because I have a thing for masochism. Here, one engages, converses, observes, circulates with the following personality types:
The Serial Liker: One fine morning you wake up and realise that a random stranger on your Friends List has liked 23,90,483 post/ photos of you and is one Like away from officially being your stalker. The PetLove-poster: The reason why suddenly, by osmosis almost, you know too much about how furry creatures snuggle, how vegans will change the world, and how heroic quadrupleds have been saving the world many times over all this while.
The Sleuth of Janaani: The silent tomb that watches all the drama unfold and meticulously stores the details for making offline conversation embarassing as hell. Most lethal when from the relative clan.
The I-Was-Here Check-in Freak: The one whose dincharya reads like a leisurely trawl through the Food & Nightlife pages of this magazine, while all you’re chained to your desk with a mile-long To Do list that has only ‘Facebook Break’ struck off it.
The Inspirational Quote-Monger: All she ever does is post photos of sunsets with quotes that remind you of Paulo Coelho in his worst passages.
The Conspiracy Theorist: Paranoid sharer of all stories about all the wild, invisible, toxic secrets in your food, in your potty, in your government, in your Facebook Privacy settings.
The Opinion Regurgitator: The one who has Breaking News on one tab, and the Facebook wall one the other. He scans headlines, fits them into predesignated files under ‘Issues and Opinion’, combs his wall for related and unresearched photo-stories, shares them as his own. Sometimes he also adds an emotional liner in the style of a certain news presenter we all know, who has more flair for Bengali English Drama than the truth. This one is in an Its-Complicated relationship with The Conspiracy Theorist.
The Typo Emperor: The one whose preposition-less, all-small-letters, typo-riddled status updates makes every grammar-loving, punctuation-crazy, English Hons types want to smash the computer and jump off the window. Sometimes co-incides with the Check-in Freak.
The Wily Columnist-Anthropologist: Erm, we all know who that is.
Shocking, I know. But perhaps what is more shocking, is what FB is doing to my offline life. It’s self-reckoning at its nastiest joke. A sick déjà vu follows me around everywhere offline - which is what happens to an ex-journo with elephantine memory, robust appetite for bottom-of-the-barrel masala, and all the time to comb her FB wall. I revel in the horrid silent moments of knowing that stranger’s name the second before he introduces himself. I live with the perpetual dread of meeting the person whose Friend Request I deleted 1,000 times. In a sometimes relieving, sometimes sick sort of way, I don’t really miss people anymore.
Ever since I’ve bitten the apple, fallen from innocence, my pristine and naïve pre-Facebook imagination is corrupting slowly but surely. Big planks are being unscrewed in my forever-floating, melodramatic anguish-boat – the one that loves to wail about how the most beautiful love stories are the most tragic. In a post-Facebook world, they needn't be tragic. They can just be complicated. Comedies can now be rendered untangled, and mistaken identities sorted with the click of a button (Shakespeare would’ve been out of a job today). There would be no Before Sunset to my Before Sunrise, because no one can be anonymous for 10 years anymore. Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, of course she could’ve walked into Rick’s.
Surely, the new tragedy is Facebook itself. I sigh, I whine, I cry for help (but I never leave); my audience ‘Like’s it and demands an encore. Of course, I always oblige.
WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE
Addiction to beat addiction. By the time a typical May day ends its fire-spitting and you can step out, it’s time to go to sleep. On nights like these, a drive-search for the perfect paan totally bantaa hai. Dilliwali’s favourite spot is – no, not outside Claridges – but a little hidden pocketed-away shop in the MP mohalla of North Avenue, just off the RML Hospital roundabout. Pandey ji – who happens to be, incidentally, the official supplier of paan to the Rashtrapati Bhawan - has been making stellar paan for the last seven decades, and charming everybody from Obama to Birju Maharaj. MF Husain was so happy with his paan that he made him a painting, with Hanuman flying in with Mount Dronagiri that has paan leaves growing on it!
There are about 35 paans to choose from (think Pina Colada, BlackBerry, Choco Caramel, and something called 4th Idiot, for the chronically adventurous), but my favourite is the ‘Madhuri Dixit’ sweet paan. It comes chilled, in a size that doesn’t make you look like you could star in a Jaws sequel, has a leaf that melts in your mouth, and a filling that has absolutely no sookhi supaari landmines. Just like Madhuri would say, ‘Purrrfect’.
PANDEY’S PAAN Shop No. 3, New MP’s Market, North Avenue, Ph: 23094043, 9013447404, 9871414218
(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).
There was a time not so long ago, when I became a Facebook widow. ‘What was it like?’, you ask.
Brief, I say.
All it took for my Husband-in-FB-rehab to come back from the dead, was a quick click on ‘Get Back’, and lo behold, I was saubhagyawati again.
My husband has a healthy relationship with his Facebook addiction. He hurtles through regular cycles that go from ‘FB-Overdose’ to ‘Only 3 Minutes FB per day’ and back. I, on the other hand, am a Facebook junkie, especially when deadlines for this column are whooshing past. I treat it like an extra limb, my finger forever poised over the f key, my password autofed and my access as easy as two quick stabs at Enter. When I’m not on FB, I experience typical de-addiction moments: restlessness of the insane order, itching need to give into just-one-more-time cravings, super remorse at spending an entire day sniffing up my addiction again.
You know how the foundation of our past has always been about before and after? Before Christ and After Christ. Before Puberty and After Puberty. Before Cable TV and After MTV. Then came Google and the history of our memory function was written anew as Pre Google and Post Google. And even though I meet at least person per fortnight who says, ‘I’m not on Facebook ya,’ we all know that in this tiny world of Dilli, conversations are going from Pre-Facebook to Post-Facebook. We are pre-empting, posing, pretending, parading, perhaps sometimes wondering why we can’t simply end a conversation with a Like button, post a comment and run away, own anything quickly by posting a smug, head-tilted, hand-on-waist photograph clicked in front of it.
In a post-Facebook world, everything is overlapping so quickly, I’m wondering if a couple of years later I’ll be telling my kids bedtime fables about how once upon a time Facebook was just a website. It’s the hard, persistent truth: some little twiggy bits of my DNA have forever been altered in the FB aftermath. It’s happening to me even as I type and snoop around Facebook for the gazillionth time since I started. For one, earthshattering import is recording on my language and brain functions; innocuous words such as ‘Like’, ‘Friends’, ‘Privacy’, ‘Complicated’ have been altered forever in meaning. Other words are rapidly losing their previous reading-resonance: ossam has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, nyc nothing to do with New York City, anything greater than 3 can be love. Neighbour aunties are losing the battle to Facebook when it comes to wheedling out juicy gossip (‘How are you feeling today?’), insecurity-inducing tactics ('You added 2 friends this month.' 'Your friends added 1066 friends.' ‘Your Husband added friends you may know’), and engineering misgivings (when clicking on ‘Help a Friend’ leads to your mother’s profile page).
My online life is more often than not, like a rotten party I go to all the time, because I have a thing for masochism. Here, one engages, converses, observes, circulates with the following personality types:
The Serial Liker: One fine morning you wake up and realise that a random stranger on your Friends List has liked 23,90,483 post/ photos of you and is one Like away from officially being your stalker. The PetLove-poster: The reason why suddenly, by osmosis almost, you know too much about how furry creatures snuggle, how vegans will change the world, and how heroic quadrupleds have been saving the world many times over all this while.
The Sleuth of Janaani: The silent tomb that watches all the drama unfold and meticulously stores the details for making offline conversation embarassing as hell. Most lethal when from the relative clan.
The I-Was-Here Check-in Freak: The one whose dincharya reads like a leisurely trawl through the Food & Nightlife pages of this magazine, while all you’re chained to your desk with a mile-long To Do list that has only ‘Facebook Break’ struck off it.
The Inspirational Quote-Monger: All she ever does is post photos of sunsets with quotes that remind you of Paulo Coelho in his worst passages.
The Conspiracy Theorist: Paranoid sharer of all stories about all the wild, invisible, toxic secrets in your food, in your potty, in your government, in your Facebook Privacy settings.
The Opinion Regurgitator: The one who has Breaking News on one tab, and the Facebook wall one the other. He scans headlines, fits them into predesignated files under ‘Issues and Opinion’, combs his wall for related and unresearched photo-stories, shares them as his own. Sometimes he also adds an emotional liner in the style of a certain news presenter we all know, who has more flair for Bengali English Drama than the truth. This one is in an Its-Complicated relationship with The Conspiracy Theorist.
The Typo Emperor: The one whose preposition-less, all-small-letters, typo-riddled status updates makes every grammar-loving, punctuation-crazy, English Hons types want to smash the computer and jump off the window. Sometimes co-incides with the Check-in Freak.
The Wily Columnist-Anthropologist: Erm, we all know who that is.
Ever since I’ve bitten the apple, fallen from innocence, my pristine and naïve pre-Facebook imagination is corrupting slowly but surely. Big planks are being unscrewed in my forever-floating, melodramatic anguish-boat – the one that loves to wail about how the most beautiful love stories are the most tragic. In a post-Facebook world, they needn't be tragic. They can just be complicated. Comedies can now be rendered untangled, and mistaken identities sorted with the click of a button (Shakespeare would’ve been out of a job today). There would be no Before Sunset to my Before Sunrise, because no one can be anonymous for 10 years anymore. Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, of course she could’ve walked into Rick’s.
Surely, the new tragedy is Facebook itself. I sigh, I whine, I cry for help (but I never leave); my audience ‘Like’s it and demands an encore. Of course, I always oblige.
WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE
Addiction to beat addiction. By the time a typical May day ends its fire-spitting and you can step out, it’s time to go to sleep. On nights like these, a drive-search for the perfect paan totally bantaa hai. Dilliwali’s favourite spot is – no, not outside Claridges – but a little hidden pocketed-away shop in the MP mohalla of North Avenue, just off the RML Hospital roundabout. Pandey ji – who happens to be, incidentally, the official supplier of paan to the Rashtrapati Bhawan - has been making stellar paan for the last seven decades, and charming everybody from Obama to Birju Maharaj. MF Husain was so happy with his paan that he made him a painting, with Hanuman flying in with Mount Dronagiri that has paan leaves growing on it!
There are about 35 paans to choose from (think Pina Colada, BlackBerry, Choco Caramel, and something called 4th Idiot, for the chronically adventurous), but my favourite is the ‘Madhuri Dixit’ sweet paan. It comes chilled, in a size that doesn’t make you look like you could star in a Jaws sequel, has a leaf that melts in your mouth, and a filling that has absolutely no sookhi supaari landmines. Just like Madhuri would say, ‘Purrrfect’.
PANDEY’S PAAN Shop No. 3, New MP’s Market, North Avenue, Ph: 23094043, 9013447404, 9871414218
(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).
posted by Punky PJs @ 8:08 PM
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