The good, the bad and the internet

On Friday I took the pilgrimage to Gurgaon to spend the night at my adopted family's, The Sen's. I've already teared up the blog with sentimental ranting about them so I'm not going to do it again. The teenage brat brigade announced as soon as I landed in their home, that it was ice-skating day. Ten years ago someone this might have been interpreted as a code or an imaginary game, but anything in possible in Generation Insane. Initially I was super apprehensive because I have never worn skates in my life and was tired of being reminded of my complete lack of athletic capability. But after I trotted on the side like an old woman for a bit I finally got over my fear of being on wheels and did alright. But my life's new mission is to learn how to whiz around on ice skates for which I will have to sell myself (Fake ice in tropical countries costs the world) or move to Canada. 
So on the way back from ice skating and the kids going to every single shop in the mall and claiming that anything inside ten grand is affordable (my bracket is five), we started walking home. 
After about ten minutes of walking we noticed a Ford Fortuner was trailing us silently. If S.U.V's are the jocks on the road, the Fortuner is football captain. Soon we realized that the driver had a gun and got into an auto and raced home, still followed closely. After a very scary twenty minutes, me and six teenagers(two of them being girls who were the asshole's main interest),  somehow got home to a couple of drunk parents watching C.I.D. 
While sitting around the table pretending to still be frightened but actually cracking up from moment to moment, Tan asks me if I remember the guy's face. Absolutely, I say. In no time a blackberry is out and in five minutes the asshole's face is on it. 
'Yahi hai na?'. 'Haan dude yeh kaise kiya tune?'. 'Abbe, aaj kal sab ho jaata hai'.
Tan had already thought of possible names while we were in the auto. Someone had talked to him before about a guy who lived near his house and owned a white Fortuner. ('People don't buy big cars if they don't want to be seen'-important wisdom from a 16 year old) . Someone on his Facebook 'could have been' this guy, or friends with him. After going through various photo albums, he found a photo of a bunch of guys in a Ford Fortuner. He slowly went to each one's profile and sought out the most probable, the face he remembered most. Because of Facebook, we had found his name, address, education details. They called the police and everyone took a good look at his photo knowing what the hell to do the next time they see him. The asshole driver had been found and warned and addressed by his name at first sight which had taken him by surprise and scared the shit out of him. 
Everyone is on facebook.
It didn't solve much, but to the kids, knowing that their dangerous stalker was on Facebook, he posed for pictures like them, and they knew his surname and ex girlfriend's details, made them feel better. 
Everyday, I mourn the loss of anxiety, the thrill of not knowing something, but sometimes it is time to accept that we live in an age of speed. We live by aggression, not passive patience. V and I recently found that the man who we love across continents has a girlfriend. Not out of malice but sheer curiosity and the ability to actually know, I found out who she is. 
My friend got into university to play guitar because he got the most likes on his song. 
My uncle told me that one time he had to wait five days for someone who lived in the same city to tell him that she loved him back. Recently I met someone from another country who is leaving in two weeks. Two days back, when I hadn't gotten a Facebook message for a whole 24 hours, I had several panic attacks. Between about fifty exchanged messages and ten encounters I believe that I have spent with someone a time that I know I will remember always. Our existence is no more fluid, we exist in fragments. We don't evolve over years, but go back and forth from time to time. Connections with the world and moments of definition are brief. Like the instance when someone offers you a light at a bar. Or when a song plays that everyone knows. Or when you write a sentence and it happens to make sense even for that second. We live in hyperspace. Reality disappears almost immediately after it is created. Right now I can feel one thing and in ten minutes I could be feeling another. It is an age of instantaneous indecision. 
  
Aristotle insisted that man is by nature, a social animal. We live communally. We exist BY people, not just with. To believe that technology has stolen an intangible human essence, one preserved over centuries is essentially wrong. There is no human nature, it constantly invents itself in changing realms of subjective truth. Today we live in Facebook, in twitter, in a world when you meet someone at a party the thrill is growing out what you already know of them. Growing is to realize people's lives always look better on facebook. Anything we know for ten minutes becomes mundane and we turn to google to broaden the restless limits of our knowledge. Collection, and not cognition has become the way of knowing. Technology and social networking must be used rather than as a huge sea to wallow and drown in as a tool to make whatever of our lives is left better. Because there is no complete escaping them. Everyone has an online fix. High speed internet is the new oxygen. We wake up in the mornings and run to our keyboards. Everyone is on a quest of connection beyond see-able limits. We write blogs, we go to chat forums. We fall in love with faces on our desktops, with words from unknown sources. Facebook is just the most self confessed of all. It is voluntary submission. It feeds into the notion that superficial knowing is complete knowing. On our blogs we rejoice in supposed anonymity, but pour more of ourselves onto the screen than on our Facebook profiles. Under the blanket of anonymity we transport more of ourselves for the rest of the world to know. 
The loss of a preceding era is natural but it is important to realize it is not possible to exist outside a system. I know none of this makes any sense but I have decided to wake up everyday and rid myself of a little melancholia. Be Nietzsche, not Rousseau. In non-pretentious coherent language that means something along the lines of not to mourn, but to celebrate. 
I totally want to be Rousseau though, all hot and brooding and shit. 
Look how cheerful Jamiroquai is.

All day I have read 'young successful(published) Indian authors' online, via their blogs and have gotten seriously pissed off. After writing this I am deathly afraid that at a lot of times I sound like writing that I hate. So I feign self hatred and claim transparency to make myself feel cooler and believe I am better than most my age because at least I KNOW that I don't(know). And I say it again and again so at least you will believe me, even if I don't. 
All I know is that I don't know anything, you know. 


“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves.” 
Julain Barnes, The Sense of an Ending