Picture credit - blogohblog.com

People who spend maximum of their internet time on social networking sites are the ones who are destroying it the most. A person who creates his first profile at orkut (or any other Social Networking site) keeps it very clean, and types his profile info and scraps very clearly. Then he spends some time there, sees the profile of their friends, and destroys his language, and the simplicity of the profile.

The first thing – I’m yet to understand the reason behind people constantly changing their Profile names to crappy quotes or annoying self-proclaimed titles such as “lost ma mobile phone” “life looks better now” “i puked yesterday” () or “beauty lies in your attitude” (and those are the First name + Last name). I mean, how the hell someone is going to find them by search utility? For one more reason, how am I supposed to know that the one listed as ‘just special, and is not weird‘ in my friend list is actually “Sophia” when I need to scrap her. People should use the status display to write all this. Changing their name like this actually defeats the purpose of social networking.

Second – the language – The next thing that annoys me most about these Social networks is that people write in a language like

hiiiiiiiii ………………
hieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee….
vveeerrrryyyyy sssssswwweeeeettt
buh-bayee!!
U mst do tis by urself

This looks insane to me. The morons who are obsessed with typing too many i’s and e’s must lower the repeat rate off their Keyboard strokes (Go to Control Panel > Keyboard > Repeat Delay and set it to short). For those who  ignore the red underlines thrown by your spell-checker,  while SMS’ing, you have limited characters, so this may sound OK. But, using this on internet? Don’t you people own a QWERTY keyboard or what? It looks like one of them writes like this because he doesn’t know to write proper English. And then everyone thinks that cool and adopt it.  According to me, that sucks. What is the whole point in writing like that? I feel like an ass deciphering the encrypted scraps and tweets I receive.

Thirdly, the mentality of managing two or more accounts – This is also an issue which beats the whole concept of social networking. How many males I have seen, who have at least one duplicate account, which they run with a fake Female name, use a display pic of a nice looking girl (leached from the WWW, obviously), and have a status which more or less signifies “Boys not allowed” Then they send out requests to girls and chat with them. These losers must get a life. How can they ever believe that they can search for a “love” online? In a country like India, forget about a date with a sweet girl, even a hooker won’t contact you through a social networking site.

With these and some more points (on which, I’ll rant about in later posts), the social networking sites have become a pain for me. My orkut and Facebook accounts, which I used to visit regularly in old days (literally speaking, I had them permanently open in tabs with auto-refresh enabled on the tabs), have now become the least significant place to update me about the issues. I hardly visit them once in a day. How badly I wish that the creators of these sites can come up with some !deas to clean up the mess, and we could relish them in the way we did in the days of their golden glory..

So Pravesh and I were watching “Dostana“. The movie was at the crucial (?) point where Abhishek Bacchan was trying to explain to their landlady that he and John were gay.

So he started off (the following dialogue is just an approximation of what’s actually said. I am not so good at memorizing things word-to-word)

Abhishek: Yeh mera khaas dost hai.
Landlady: To? Dost hai to kya hua?
Abhishek: Nahin, ye mera ‘khaas’ dost hai.
…
…
…
And the conversation went on with Abhishek trying various permutations and combinations. When none of them seemed to be working, John got irritated and said…

J: Hum Gay Hain!!
…

Of course, I was laughing along, coz it was a bit unexpected, at least for me, and yeah, funny. But I was never ready for what was coming next.

A small girl (I guess her age to be about 4-7 years) sitting behind me asked her mom,

“Mummy gay kya hota hai?”

Her mom just shushed her, but she didn’t stop… I must say that she wanted to know real bad.

I could see her mom trying desperately to get the kid to shut up. But she didn’t. She started screaming at the top of her voice,

“MUMMY BATAO NA! GAY KYA HOTA HAI?”

and for a moment the entire crowd was looking towards her. Oh God! I laughed so hard, and that was probably the most funny moment in the whole film. I can’t imagine how embarrassing her mother must’ve found it.

Anyways, it got me to think on various issues,  but they’re too serious to put down here (at least with the genre of this post), so I’ll save a bit of space.

P.S. –> Recounting it all on this blog is not doing full justice with it.
You had to be there. It was so hillarious!