THE NEW WORLD.....PART 1

This is a whole world by itself. It is called the ‘virtual’ world. But true inhabitants of this world do not think so. For them, it is real…….more real than life itself. The ability to be what they cannot ‘really’ be in the ‘real’ world and to do what they have never considered themselves capable of doing and to make the other inhabitants of this world believe what they want to make them believe, makes this world the vibrant reality for them. Often these beliefs spill over……….to the ‘real’ world. So, people who otherwise considered themselves as ‘mirror cracking material’ , look and feel more beautiful…….and people who otherwise never talk with females, become the most popular and networked people..!

To reach out to a world full of ‘real’ people like them, to extend packets of energy at the speed of light, to anticipate what kind of packet of energy will be sent from the other side during seconds of silence, to feel thrilled at the prospect of praise and feel cheated at the prospect of deceit and seethe with anger at the prospect of injustice, to explore the unexplored inside their own souls by the exchange of quanta of energy, to bash up the other side with thunderous words when ignominious turns take place……all this is the very beauty of this world.

My tryst with this world, started during class 6. For the first time in Bhubaneswar, a private cable tv network ushered in dial-up internet connections. It was slow like hell but since there was no standard for comparison at that time, me and my sister accepted it with open arms. It is only now, in the Broadband Era, that we realize how abominably slow and bad those times were………thank God times have progressed……..more importantly, thanks to the scientists and innovators, for making ‘real’ technological advances every nano-second as well as ensuring that Moore’s Law holds true……..:)

So there I was…….blinking with open eyes…….at the new world……which looked deceitfully small….entrapped inside that _by_ inches computer screen. My sister, like a virtuoso, immediately picked up the tricks of browsing and e-mailing….tricks to write mails offline and tricks to open 4 to 5 websites at a time and tricks to use search engines. So there she was….typing the names of 4 to 5 websites and waiting till what seemed an eternity for ‘logging in’ to take place…….and finally when the long beep of connection would take place sounding like the best and most soothing music to the ears……..we would heave a sigh of relief and happiness would splash across our faces. Had there been a hidden camera on the comp screen, it’d have caught our plethora of emotions and caught our eager, inquisitive faces virtually tearing into the screen and would have been an award-winning documentary!!!

Initially, it was sheer thrill to enter this world….but oh…….we would have scarcely entered……and the red cross would’ve appeared at the ‘connection’ icon at the bottom…………heck……..we’d be disconnected every 5 minutes. It tested our patience to the hilt, and in between, very rarely, that too in the wee hours of the night, we would be rewarded with an hour or so of ‘undisconnected’ connection! So what if the pages took long minutes to open…….?!

At least we were………...ahem……..connected……..!!