Lets Face it!

At one point of time the world seemed to be divided into just two classes of people, those who did Facebook and those who did not!! There was also an unspeakable class who had not heard of Facebook!! Life’s mission and the only philanthropic, proselytizing activity in my initial Facebook days, was inducting as many people I could into this networking site! After managing to create a profile page for my worse half, I inducted my son!! ‘Oh!’ gasped his school moms… ‘How could you do this? You don’t know how addicted he will be, I had to pull out my Rahul after there were remarks from school that he wasn’t doing his homework!’ I chuckled silently. Who will understand that the main reason for bringing my son into Facebook was that I needed a monitor to stop me when I was over indulging in it!! My heart filled with pride as my Homepage read ‘Thankyou Nandini, because of your effort many of your friends are in Facebook.’ I beamed and called my son to see that bit of notice and he nonchalantly replied that it was there in his homepage too. Disheartened I thought… ‘Okay no problems, we are into good deeds together!!’

Rediscovering old school and college friends and stumbling upon teenage crushes was another marvel of Facebook. Recognizing my school pals was undoubtedly difficult…the gawky girl had turned into a head turner…the slender school beauty queen into a matron and my handsome crush into a pot bellied bald!!
If I happened to get introduced to somebody, I would sooner or later ask, ‘are you into Facebook?’ and if the person had been agreeable my friend list would go up immediately. I also enjoyed the prophetic quizzes…that I am this and that, and it was so satisfying to feel that at least Facebook was realizing my true worth!!! …they predicted my soul was actually Golden, I was a Dreamer, I was Marie Curie in my last birth or I have the ‘Cleopatra element’, whatever that means.

There was also a time when I had a virtual household in Facebook, with two dogs and three cats and a rodent. I loved feeding, bathing and taking them to the vet and for all my caring gestures Facebook gave me points. I could also feed and care for other people’s pets to earn points. Good deeds have seldom been so rewarding in real life. But sadly with Facebook’s ever changing formats I soon lost interest in these virtual family members. Yet most of my waking hours were spent brain storming over a new status update…what shall I write this time? Something silly, witty, philosophical or contemporarily political?

But there is something about Facebook, I don’t know how to define it, that turns us into Voyeurs!! Most of the time my Homepage displays somebody else’s photo album on which one of my friends have commented. I am tempted to see these personal pictures of people I hardly know. I get a peep into their beautiful farm houses or lavish living rooms, or some wonderful scenic place they have visited, I guess and gather facts about their magical or mundane lives and I uncomfortably recall the ‘gaze’.

Facebook is a place where you can be friends even with Didi ( though I haven’t really checked whether she has a profile here), where a 50+ person is suddenly listed as ‘married now’ if he happens to create his profile page recently. Where fathers in law are friends with daughters in law and the Wall remains fresh even without Bergers and Nerolacs. This is really beautiful. You connect with like minded people you haven’t met and there are so many forums and pages of your interest….and you can do things in Facebook which you don’t do on a daily basis at home…like ‘smiling’ at your spouse only on Facebook (through ‘Send Smiles’). You can also drop elephants and break coconuts on friends who itch you, without any ‘real’ consequences, it’s just that the feeling counts!!

The fairytale queen had a mirror through which she entered a magical world…I am sure she was entering Facebook with a different nomenclature!! And I wouldn’t have been surprised if Carnavon and Carter found hieroglyphs that Champollion deciphered as Tut’s profile page!!

nandini basu