Death of the Email Forward

Winehouse. Dead.
    Celebrity deaths leave me in a soup. There are these die-hard fans who mourn like hell and cry and make a scene. The black. There are these non fans who don't give two owl hoots about Amy Winehouse and are content with their Punjabi hip hop. The White. The pseudo connoisseurs of "World Music" (Me included) have listened only to one song, "Rehab" and liked it immensely. The grey.  What do I do?
   I update my fb status, conveying deep condolences and wait hungrily for likes.
   Before you judge the writer for making light of a poor woman's annihilation into the after life, you can't deny she brought it upon herself with that incessant drug habit of her's. Sad. (She did join the Forever 27 club though. People are literally dying to join that club).
   Being a real ignoramus in the realm of Internet trends (As the last post demonstrated), I continue to dish out observations without any research as.... research. I'm not much of an email forwarding person. I archive whatever I get, see them vanish in a silent whoosh and bask in the contentment that I just occupied a few more Megabytes of them Google Hard drives.
   I don't get forwards anymore.
  Is it just some "I don't send you 'cos you don't send me" thing or have users actually gotten bored with forwarding emails? The writer harks back to the days of "Forward or Yahoo! will delete your account" and (With all due respect) "Two day old Jessica has Paraneoplastic Syndrome. Forward and AOL will contribute 10c".
  One would  naturally blame Zuckerberg and StumbleUpon for this. Found a website interesting? You put it on your wall and 'earn' likes (or +1s, Sheesh). Found a cute little Internet Meme about wannabe nerdo school girls? Put it on G+ along with your trademark #hashtag. All this criticism notwithstanding, the reader would've most probably visited this post through the link on my fb wall. What kind of a hypocritical world is this?
  My hols are drawing to an unholy end and I am praying to god that I don't develop withdrawal symptoms towards the extremely, extremely sedentary lifestyle I've been leading at home.
  Off to Pack. Over and out.   

Soul of Wit

   Yes, this is going to be one of those horribly pretentious (not to mention boring) 'observations-of-society-by-an-enlightened-intellectual' posts. So save yourself, before it's too late.
A few disclaimers first:
   The control group was very small, just a few college mates. Others significant factors blatantly ignored. Bad economics, overall. But who cares? It's my ducking blog.
   Let's rewind the clocks a bit. Blogger (The blogging site) was launched by Pyra Labs in 1999 and later bought by Google in 2003. Facebook let go of its snooty "For ivy leaguers only" tag in 2004. Yahoo! acquired Flickr in 2005 and Twitter arrived in 2006. Stumbleupon though started in 2001, hit ten Million users by 2010.

Anything click?

Here's more. The average blog reader stays a nice 96 seconds per blog. You are a facebooker. You tell me how much time you spend on someone's profile, status update or a photo album. Unless one is a connoisseur who admires the 'nuances' and 'inner depth' involved in photography, one is not going to spend more than 12 seconds on a photo (I'll get to the captions later). Twitter allows only 140 characters. And if you're a stumbler, you'd have realized the point the writer's trying to drive home.
   Let's talk about two things, status updates and photo captions. Not just normal 'We are Pardayying!' photos but the aesthetic, professional worthy-of-Photog-club ones which a few friends of mine post regularly as well.
  Status messages of school goers were usually a long affair, starting with a quote or saying, then blowing it completely out of context and ending somewhat stupidly with an indifferent reference to acads or parents.

"Ncessty s da mothr f invnshn. Ma mothr joind fb. ztkfi del my acc?? Wt do i do??? :P:D:):|:( "  (Two years ago)
"Damn... hate examz...." (One year ago)
"Dang." (Now). Other examples: "Roxanne", "Inis Mona" and "Sheesh". (Don't ask me what they mean.)


     Photo captions by few school friends of mine were longer too. They felt the need to explain the pains taken, the result in mind and the means to achieve those ends. Then they became a line from the lyrics of a never-heard-of song. Now they're just one word. "Corrosion" (Describing a rusted gate), "Headspace"(Palm trees billowing in the wind) and "Diablo"(A black man in three-fourths taking a drought). Just one word.

Brevity.
  The writer stands vindicated, when they declared to the world that companies are "capitalizing on the younger generation's increasingly decreasing attention span." As supply of content (Statuses, photos, wall posts) increases, demand (Read attention span) decreases and therefore sentences began to get shorter to keep the demand going. Intelligence is being curt. Brevity is now the soul of it, pun intended.
  This will help clear the air in case you're yet to be convinced. Internet Memes. Very Short, very Sharp and very, very sexy. 
Convinced?
  This does not mean you run to your broker and ask him to buy up as many shares of that brand new internet social site where users can post and comment in only one word. And later sue me when the bubble bursts. In case you haven't noticed, I just disproved my theory by writing a 500 word post and keeping you glued till the very end. Worship me.

Whoa

Thousand Hits. Thank you.

Slum Road

  The Scooty Pep+ sped on, making note of the piling traffic ahead. A slow drizzle started, wetting his spectacles as he took a short-cut into a narrow, tar road situated in a slum area. He slowed down a bit.
  Thatched huts, all fighting to get a little more of the road to encroach upon. Extremely small doors that you would have bend double to get through. Loudspeakers every 50 meters or so, blaring Shlokas. Ladies and girls standing outside a Syntex tank to receive their Kodam of water for the day. The quintessential politician's poster, with a politician walking, clutching the hem of his veshti, politician smiling, politician talking on his cell phone. Below were smaller pictures of the constituency representatives, hooligans, gangsters with outrageous side-burns. The posters of Prabhakaran the LTTE chief, were there about a year ago. They had been removed now. The drizzle slowly stopped.
   And the children! Their innocence still preserved, the road their second home. Teenagers with audacious low cut cheap jeans playing marbles, five year olds with plastic toy cars, dark skinned girls playing that hopping game, all on the road. Others ran off into roads that snaked in and out of the area, cars screeching to a halt behind them.
  The scooty slowed down to a crawl. The hands that rode it were alert, lest some child came running across unexpectedly. It stopped. There was a row of small stones kept on the road, a cheap barricade. He looked ahead.
   Up ahead stood a stage, propped with thick wooden sticks, six feet high, on the road. On it were miniature bulbs, the ones used in decorative lighting, connected with wires, which twisted and twirled to light up a huge Parvathi Devi. Further ahead was the temple, packed with devotees attending the Pooja. He smiled. He should have paid more attention to the loudspeakers.
  He considered squeezing through whatever bit of road was left. Beside him, old men on plastic chairs gave a knowing smile.  He turned around. Slum dogs, he muttered. The scooty traced back and sped into another world, a world it was more comfortable with.
  The slummers carried on, oblivious to him and the world surrounding them.