Down and Out on Hope Street

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Human beings love new beginnings. It makes for a great personal narrative! We want to leave our past behind and not be bogged down by it. We want to be a better person than we currently are. We want to have the perfect reply when confronted with a taunt -embedded with the truth - masquerading as joke. But we couldn’t think of anything at that time and now it’s too late. We can’t really change the past but we can always imagine living an inspirational life in a distant future. And there is nothing more inspiring than ‘a fresh start.’ And there is no better time than December to take stock of your life and convince yourself to begin anew. We seem to think that the year has only eleven months and December is the waiting period between the current year and the next. A whole month of being in limbo. December is like the child nobody cares about because he neither gets good marks nor can he play any sports.

There is something about December that turns everybody contemplative. We like to imagine that we spent the year actually doing something other than meandering through our life wondering where it all went wrong. So we try to quantify our whole year. We start making lists of everything that we’ve done. And coincidently, whatever we liked turns out to be the best the year had to offer. Top 10 things I could have done to improve my life instead of watching everything put out by HBO. Five things my grandmother said that were racist but I pretended were adorable. Thirty Thousand things I wanted to tell my boss but couldn’t because he’s a raving asshole and is the reason I die a little, everyday.

There is something about December which makes people overestimate their capacity for self-improvement. We make promises to ourselves that we know we won’t be able to follow through. And yet we still make them because hope is a flame which never burns out. Suddenly, we think that we’ll rise above our own mediocrity to start losing weight/quit smoking/stop re-tweeting compliments. We don’t want to begin the new year as ourselves. We want to spray some magic dust and turn into someone better. Even though the odds of that happening are even more remote than Sachin Tendulkar ever playing another one-day international, but hey, stranger things have happened, right?

There is something about December which makes everyone nostalgic. Suddenly, every old memory is drudged out and even people in their early twenties remember their childhood with a loud sigh and a fond head tilt. Did you really have the best time of your life when you were living in a socialist dystopia with one teevee channel, no internet and a twenty year wait for a telephone? Are you really sure that everything tastes better with a dash of poverty and a smidgen of desperation? Let’s face it. Everything seems better in hindsight. In reality, your childhood sucked. What’s so great about being a child anyway? Everyone tells you what to do; you have to pretend to feel guilty while blowing away your parent’s money on useless things like textbooks & tuition and you have to bribe your driver to make sure he doesn’t talk about all your recreational trips to your neighbourhood ‘Wine & Beer’ shop. If I wanted someone else to make rules for my life, I would have joined a religion.

There is something about December that turns everybody sincere. Maybe it’s the realisation that they’re getting closer to death or that they’ve already had a drink or two but even the most cynical people will sit beside you at a party and tell you about their hopes and dreams until you realize you’ve been listening to them drone on for an hour and you fake a phone call to get out of the conversation. It’s like everyone is going through the existential angst that you usually hear about in a Coldplay song.

There is something about December that makes people want to share its end with the whole world. For some reason a large percentage of people prefer to bring in the new year in a room full of strangers, eating cold food and drinking watered down alcohol, while being “entertained” by out of work performers. Sounds as exciting as a hernia operation! So many plans are made to be broken. And most of the time, even if you try to follow through on them, you end up not reaching your destination because of a traffic jam and you begin your fresh start with a road full of hostile, resentful strangers while trying to assure your empty stomach that you will be at your destination shortly as you calmly rue the day you decided to buy the tickets to your local rotary club’s “rocking” new year bash featuring some generic Punjabi pop song yeller. You sit there and contemplate how this came about and where it all went wrong.

Just like Mother Nature intended.

Have a great new year! Probably going to be just like the last one, but, whatever.

How Twitter changed my life!

On a fateful night two years ago I have absolutely no recollection of, I joined the “microblogging” site popularly referred to as Twitter. Little did I know that when I filled in that form with my details and clicked on “Create my Account”, my life would be changed forever.

Before I joined twitter, I was just like you. I foolishly thought that I had my life all figured out, thanks to the secret of life revealed to me in the book, The Secret. If all I had to do to make things happen was to WISH for them, I could do that all day long. So I quit my job and spent my days wishing for things. When after a few months nothing happened, I began to question my worldview. One particularly tough night, after spending hours wishing for a measly glass of Rum & Coke, I realized that the Universe wasn’t really listening to me. It was probably spending it’s time paying attention to some malnutritioned African kid and serving him MY rum & Coke. It dawned on me that the universe was a socialist with a bleeding heart and an NPR tote bag!

So it was up to me to look after myself. I bought a bootleg copy of The Fountainhead (free markets FTW!), and spent the next month reading it (have you seen the size of that damn book?).One day, the ghost of Ayn Rand appeared in my dreams and asked me to sign up for twitter. The ghost also asked me to lend it some money, because apparently, the shops in hell are a little expensive, being monopolistic enterprises and all. I realized that Ayn was testing me and refused to lend her ghost any money. In fact, I told Ayn’s ghost the same thing Ayn would tell a bearded 90 year old man who just lost his life savings in the stock market, “Get a job, whiskers!”.

Now, unbeknownst to me, Twitter was a treasure trove of wordly knowledge. It had the wisdom of Socrates, the catchiness of Confucius, the gimmickry of Yoda and the cultural relevance of Lady Gaga. So when my life changed for the better, I thought I had to share the secret with the rest of the world, as all enlightened beings are supposed to.

Here’s a gist of all the knowledge I was able to amass:

1. The art of listening: The first thing that surprised me about twitter was that in order for people to pretend to care about what I have to say, I had to accord them the same courtesy. Being a blowhard IRL (i.e. In Real Life for all you n00bs out there!), this was hard for me to understand at first. Did other people expect me to listen to them? Why would I listen to anyone when I already know what they want to say, based on how they look? Is this what being social was all about? I know that now, because of twitter. Another thing I learnt was that all I have to do to make people feel “special” is to feign interest in what they’re saying! Who’da thunk it?

2. The art of letting go: On twitter, once you write a tweet, you need to let it go.Though, be warned, It’s not that easy. In the beginning, when you see the vowels from your tweets being plucked out as harshly as a catholic priest plucks the virginity of a choir boy, all you would want to do is physically punch the culprit. You tire of the constant need to bang your head against the wall when you see someone appending a word to your tweet and totally changing it’s context. You also learn to not care about the dozens of people who will simply copy your tweets and tweet them as their own. Once you put something out there, it isn’t yours anymore. So let it go. Set it in the wild. And, if it loves you as much as you love it, it will come back to you in the form of a text message.

3. The art of sounding exotic: Thanks to twitter, I was able to learn how I can get people from other countries to pay attention to mundane events in my life like waking up or raindrops. All you have to do is romanticize everything, sprinkle a bit of melancholy, and voila before you can say “Jai Ho”, you have thousands of followers! For example, my room isn’t filthy, it’s “proof that I live a full life because each millimetre of dust contains millions of memories!” (Sadly, that doesn’t work on my Mom!). Similarly, politicians aren’t just corrupt, they “feed off the carcasses of hungry children, remaining oblivious to their plight, all the while trying to fill their insatiable greed and rotund bellies”. 

4. What women want: Earlier, all my knowledge about woman was gathered from the Mel Gibson movie, What Women Want. However, since recent events have revealed that Mel Gibson clearly has no idea about women (at least not the type of women I would like to attract), I had to turn to a new source of wisdom. And I found him on twitter. My new personal love guru, Chetan Bhagat, has made me see the light with his constant tips & tricks on how to impress women. It has not worked until now, and I have ten restraining orders against me. However, I’m pretty sure I’ll find the one one of these days. If the woman on twitter are any indication, I am almost certain that woman in general think more about sex than men. That’s because statistically,  if you’re a woman and you’re on twitter, you probably spend most of your time spewing more innuendo than an 80s British sitcom. Although, my guru tells me that the women on twitter aren’t the ones you take home to your parents. I wonder what he means by that?

5. How to support a cause: Before twitter, I was always in a flux whenever I wanted to do something for the world at large. You know, give back to the world and all that jazz. Now, whenever I hear about a cause that I think I can support, I always add a ribbon to my twitter profile picture (or as the cool kids call them, a twibbon!). Joining a facebook group is so 2007! In fact, thanks to twitter, I got Barack Obama elected as President, brought real democracy to Iran and helped cure breast cancer. That pretty much concludes my quota of “good deeds” for the rest of the decade. Santa better bring me loads of stuff this christmas!

6. Feeding your insanity: Whatever mental illness you suffer from, twitter can act as an enabler. If you are a masochist, you can follow “celebrities” on twitter and their banality will help mangle all your senses. This is even more painful than lying on a bed of nails. If you suffer from low self esteem, you can follow people who have poor language skills and a really delusional sense of self, which helps you feel a little bit saner about yourself. However, don’t feel that sane, you’re on twitter after all. I mean that as a good thing. In this Jersey Shore-ified world, being insane is a one-way ticket to popularity. Remember, all the insane people have the most followers.

7. Creating lazy content – Not only do the people on twitter like reading whatever’s on twitter. they are also really eager to read other people’s analysis about twitter. Even though almost every post/article on twitter says the same thing, people still like to read them and then retweet them, because this way they can pretend to laugh at themselves. Another reason why twitter posts are popular is because a post on twitter is the easiest thing to write. Start the post by making fun of a public figure you revile, throw in a few references to people tweeting about the food they eat, add some banal celebrities and rephrase what everyone else has said before along with some jokes. End the whole thing by adding a few meta references (because it’s important for the world to know that you can laugh at yourself too!) and your twitter post is ready.

The way we live now: The Internet in 2010

With every new internet application that becomes popular (Twitter! Facebook! Chatroulette!), there are millions of pixels written about the said phenomena. Almost all the “good” reporters write articles or do teevee news reports about how “<insert name of new web application>” is either ruining the internet and/or is a new revolutionary way to communicate with each other. (Except at Slate magazine of course, where I’m pretty sure that they’ve either written or are currently writing an article about how email is still the world’s most important “killer-app”).

Now, traditional journalists are not that fond of the internet as they claim to be. For them, the internet is sort of a bête noire. They may pretend to embrace it, but in most cases they simply come across as people devoid of any understanding of it whatsoever. Whenever they talk about the “new media” you can almost spot the froth coming out of their mouths. They can’t even know where to begin to understand the internet (to be fair, no one can. Maybe that is the beauty of the internet? OMG, we made an observation! And since it’s not on an old media platform, it probably doesn’t count!), but they bravely continue to talk about it. With embarrassing results.

The Internet in 2010: It knows everything. Just like that obnoxious kid in school.

Now here is the internet’s most common phenomena:

(a) Person A writes something and puts in on the internet.

(b) A large amount of people agree & disagree with Person A’s opinion

(c) Some snarky blogger links to Person A’s article/post and metaphorically tears it into pieces

(d) Person A writes post about how everyone who didn’t agree with them misunderstood them and/or the internet is full of mean and rude people.

The Internet in 2010: Just like your abusive ex-boyfriend. Nothing you do is ever going to be good enough.

Journalists' pride themselves in being the “first chroniclers” of history. However, nowadays, apparently, anybody with a computer and ability to type thinks “their opinion matters more than that of a journalist!” Silly idiots! How dare they think that? Thanks to the damn internet, the first chronicle of history will be by some stupid un-important person who doesn’t even have a teevee or dead-tree magazine gig and didn’t even go to some fancy journalism school.

Now, for a moment, imagine if you could read Cleopatra’s first person blog (Fuck like an Egyptian), how would you be able to figure out what she was saying? Would you have guessed that when she posted about her epic orgies with a Roman general named “Mark A”, she was referring to Roman general Mark Anthony? How would you be able to put two and two together, without the help of a journalist? How would you know that she was the first woman to ever get vajazzled?

And would Shakespeare have even bothered to write “Julius Caesar” if he found out that Caesar's death was caused by an harmless frat prank? Would there even be a “Caesar salad” if people thought that the man’s last words were “Don’t Ice me, bro”?

The Internet in 2010: Ruining history for future generations

The internet is a lot of things to lot of people. It even helps people create their own reality. Whether you want to still believe that the earth is flat, or that Paul is dead, there is an app for that. There is no universal truth anymore. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. And as it turns out, to their own facts. You don’t have to believe anything you don’t want to. And only on the internet can you have a second life, even if you don’t have a first one.

The Internet in 2010: Your own personal echo chamber

On the internet, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one.

You may think that you’re smart, funny and insightful, but there is someone on the internet who is smarter, funnier and plenty more insightful than you will ever be. For every person who likes what you say, there are ten who think that you are full of crap.

The choice here is between speaking your mind or not saying anything at all.

If you think that anyone owes you respect because of whatever, well, just remember that on the internet no one gives a shit who you are.

To paraphrase some dude, The internet owes you nothing. It was here first.

The Internet in 2010: We’re all like a bunch of monkeys trapped in a cage. You can duck all you want, but one of these days you’re going to end up with shit on your face. The best you can do is to wipe it off and hope that no one figures out that the stench is coming from you.