Facebook Blues

I am neither a regular nor a constant user of Facebook (FB), though I was an early adopter. I like to keep in touch with new technologies and emerging trends. However I have had only sporadic success with FB, and more often than not have had serious gaffes.

Like last week I wanted to wish a friend on his birthday, and since it is now de rigueur’ to use FB, I logged in to do the same. There were a host of greetings on his wall already, so I just typed in my comment and pressed enter. However I landed up posting the wish on another friends ‘wall’! Both of these friends share a common first name, and somehow FB posted ‘my’ greeting on the incorrect friend's wall. Of course he came back to thank me and politely pointed out that he prefers to celebrates his birthday on the anniversary of the day that he was born, which was a few months ago. I could only imagine his friends on FB wondering who this twit was to post wishes on the wrong day, especially in this day and age when technology takes care of all this stuff.

Then again, as some of you might know, I decided to post my previous blog on FB, and after doing so realised that I had inadvertently included a friend’s comment with it. This made the blog come across like an advert for a book or a movie, with critics comments appended. (Siskel and Ebert give this blog 2 thumbs-up!!) This was the last thing I wanted. I was anyway quite embarrassed about imposing my blog on friends through FB. But after this faux pas, I was a shattered man, as my fevered mind construed up images of my friends shaking their heads in annoyance, as they felt impelled to not only read my blog, but now leave comments as well.

Frequently I have ‘posted’ incomplete responses to other friend’s status updates, or even worse have posted the same response twice or sometimes even thrice. I press 'Enter' after typing my comment and nothing happens. I wait a while and press enter again, and then (in frustration) again, and suddenly my comment appears on the wall as many times as I pressed enter!!

FB is just such a public place for such mistakes. It is not like the time years ago, when a close friend had mistakenly inserted his love letter to his fiancé in an envelope addressed to me and vice versa a missive to me in an envelope addressed to her. His girlfriend had come running frantically to correct the mistake, and nobody was the wiser.

To compound these problems, over the last few years we now have the ability to log in from a multitude of mobile devices like IPhones, BB, IPads, etc. And me being me, I have downloaded applications on to each of these. Hence every time I log in I get a different menu and screen structure. It used to be so simple. I would go into friends if I wanted to see what was happening with a particular friend. Today every time I try and look up a friend, I get a list of people who I might know and should connect with! What happened to my list of contacts?

So now I stick to the “Like” button with the thumbs-up sign, to respond to updates. It is safe and foolproof. The worst that can happen is I 'Like' something that I should not - like a friend posting some bad news and I respond with a big thumbs-up!

Anyway despite the above issues and frustrations, I do log in infrequently to see updates.

And that is when my real misery starts.

I look at the status and picture updates and what strikes me, like a slap on the face, is that everyone I know is having a better life than me. There are pictures of shiny happy beautiful people, at parties, on the beach, at concerts, on holidays etc. To me it looks as if that is all everyone I know is doing. People are busy on vacation, partying, getting pets, attending seminars in exotic places, getting awards and winning trophies. There are status updates from concerts, airports, stadiums, beaches, movies and even airplanes!! My friends are pictured in group hugs, or holding up glasses full of bubbly, or jiving away in the funnest parties on Earth. They all seem to be visiting the places I want to see, eating stuff that I want to eat, and basically leading the life I want to lead.

Every time I log in or get a status update, I get depressed at the festivities and largesse in my "friends" lives, and the banality and drudging routine of my own. None of them ever seem to have to work, get stressed, have annoying kids or demanding bosses, or just seem to be having a bad day. OK forget a bad day! What about just a normal day? You know the one where you get up in the morning, and the next thing you know it is nighttime and you are in bed wondering where the day went and what you achieved. I have never seen an update like “@ work and twiddling my thumbs out of boredom”!!

All of my FB friends have thousands of other friends with exotic names living in as many Countries. They all seem to be in regular touch and living the way "Friends" the TV series depicted life. If they happen to have any babies or children, they are either not in evidence or all seem to be the cherubic, pleasant and self-cleansing ones, rather than the screaming, annoying and irritating infants that need nappy changes at the most inopportune time. Obviously, for a lot of them having children has not had the slightest impact on their lives, nor has it impacted their high living quotidian rhythms.

It is almost enough to make a balanced individual like myself desperate. I wonder how many winter suicides FB is responsible for. I can only imagine someone who is already having a bad day, logging into FB, seeing all these pictures of friends frolicking around, and maybe his ex-girlfriend smiling as she shares a romantic dinner with another guy, and deciding to walk to his bathtub and (literally) drown his sorrows.

To top it off, I read status updates from everyone that are so deeply philosophical and wise, that it makes me feel like an ignoramus and a simpleton. Everyone seems to have the perfect idiom for every occasion, while I struggle to think of something to say about my own mundane day. Snappy comebacks and witty answers abound in the FB world, making me shake my head in wonder at the intellect on display.

However I am thankful for some small mercies. I do not know how or why, but I have stopped receiving those innumerable updates from "Farmville", "Dogville" or whatever, with requests for milk, tractors, seeds and petrol.

I do realise of course, that Facebook is just a one-dimensional portal into our lives. It is a reflection of the way we each want our lives to be seen. Facebook is just the host of a global party, and all us guests are spruced up and putting our best foot (and face) forward. It shows only our external manifestation, made up and dressed in finery, and hides the disheveled us (warts and all) from the public eye. It is our way of sticking our tongue out to the world, giving others their come-uppance, by letting them know of what is best in our lives.

In the Facebook world it is definitely not enough (and quite boring actually) to just have a loving family, close friends and a healthy life. One needs to have a menagerie, travel to exotic locales around the world, and have hundreds (if not thousands) of friends. My friends' photo galleries are full of these and other pictures of parties and events attended. No wonder then that my wife decided to remove all our boring photographs from Facebook.

I do know what I want now and what to wish for. In my next life, I want to come back as my Facebook friend and live a Facebook life!

IPL and the Mumbai Indians

Last week I was in Bombay and I thought that I would kill two birds with one stone by going for an IPL match live. As luck would have it, there was a match scheduled for the Sunday that I was in town, between the Mumbai Indians (MI) and the Deccan Chargers. Now before I get too far ahead, let me clarify that I am a fan of the IPL, but not fanatical about it. I watch the matches, when I can and will not lose sleep if I miss them. Nor do I ardently root for any one team, though MI by dint of being from my hometown beats the others by a nose.

Well anyway I thought I would take my Dad and my Father-in-Law to the game as well - a sort of boys’ night out! I bought the tickets online and the site was impressive. It was professional, intuitive, allowed you to choose your seats and in fact also showed you the view of the ground from the seats selected. The icing on the cake was that the tickets could, and were delivered home for me.

On the evening of the match we left well in time, as these matches tend to go full, and logistics management is definitely not a strong Indian trait. We took a taxi, as parking would be impossible, and reached the stadium almost an hour before the start. As expected there were long snaking lines to get in, but to my surprise, the cops and the ushers, on seeing my father as a very senior citizen, shorted us right to the front. We were even allowed to take the elevator up to our stand, and we were on our seats a good 45 minutes before the game. So far so good!

This is when the fun started.

COMFORT

It took us exactly 5 seconds to figure out that the plastic bucket seats were a couple of sizes too small for Mahatma Gandhi, leave alone us. Even a century of fasting would not fit a sadhu's backside comfortably. As the seats next to mine (I was on the inside) started to fill, the only way to avoid physical contact was to hunch my back and roll in my shoulders. Not only was the seat narrow in width, but the builders had obviously intended for two dimensional flat figures to walk between the rows. Every time someone wanted to get into or out of the aisle, I had to lift my legs up to my shoulders and crunch up into a ball, or turn to the side and put my legs on to the lap of the person sitting next to me. All very good in a land where males think nothing of walking around holding hands and their pinkies intertwined, but would be catastrophic anywhere else! Obviously the designers were thinking about the emancipated Indian villager, when they installed the seats.

Since it was impossible for average sized individuals to sit shoulder to shoulder, we spent the next 3 hours with individuals in every alternating seat, either leaning forward or sitting back. And it was just amazing how complete strangers soon got into this rhythm.

NOISE

As the stadium started to fill up, the noise level grew exponentially. Initially that gave me a buzz, but within 15 minutes, a low grade migraine started to form in my head. The noise was incessant and loud, alternating between Bollywood music, the DJ shouting something incomprehensible, and the crowd cheering and clapping at nothing or everything. There would be a sudden roar from the crowd and I would look around in anticipation to see that people were cheering a pigeon landing on the field! Every time the crowd tired and started to become quiet, the DJ would play the IPL signature tune, to rouse the crowd into frenzy. Every time that played (which was every 10 minutes, or whenever the noise reduced by a few decibels, whichever was sooner) the mob would start clapping, hooting, trumpeting or shouting, and I would have no idea why. I have been to sports events in other parts of the world, but this was clamor at a totally different level. I have been to nightclubs which have been more sedate! Obviously we Indians do not believe we are enjoying unless our eardrums are being assaulted. I kept glancing at my father enviously, who by dint of the fact that he is hard of hearing could eject his hearing aids anytime he chose.

SEAT ALLOTTMENT

Even though the seats had been pre-allotted at the time of booking, a lot of the people obviously changed their minds on entering the stands, and decided to sit where they thought they had a better view. Hence by the time the match was about to start, there was absolute pandemonium, as the ushers tried desperately to get people in to their allotted seats, only to find them already occupied. Initially they did try and work out the seating arrangements, but they might as well have been herding cats! The ushers were ultimately reduced to helpless wrecks, as they were caught between annoyed late-comers looking for their allotted seats, and the seated customers who were growing increasingly irate as their view of the match was being impeded.

FOOD

All through the match there was a continuous procession of food and drink vendors, who thought nothing of stepping on our toes in their frantic efforts to reach the more inaccessible customers. The chap sitting next to me had obviously come there to eat, as he showed scant interest in the match and his eye was always on the lookout for these vendors. I think I saw more of his armpit as he leant across me (to grab food being passed to him and money that he passed back to the vendor), than I saw of the match. I think he sampled almost everything that was available on the menu, and there was a lot!

ACCESS

When we got to our seats at the start, I was aghast at the access and exit corridors which not only were extremely narrow, but each step was of varying height. Going up was like traversing a minefield, and one had to continuously look down to make sure that one did not over or under step, to the same bad result. To me this was a huge safety issue. But that is one area where I felt the designers had been one step ahead of me. They had been obviously aware of the inherent safety in numbers, and I noticed that as the match went on, the heaving crowd along these passages provided a safe landing for anyone (actually most people) who tripped, and in quite a few cases it was actually a soft landing on to rather well built individuals.

CONCLUSION

Well having done this once, I seriously doubt whether I will embark on a similar adventure again. I will stick to watching this on TV, where the noise levels are muted, and the weather is controlled, and the match can be watched in HD.

In retrospect I have to laud the patience of the public who put up with that environment, because anywhere else in the world the same would have sparked riots. Many were the times when I wanted to just explode at the nuisance or disturbance around me, but I controlled my emotions. I did not see a single fight or argument erupt, as most people just laughed, compromised, accommodated and endured with a shrug on their shoulders, a smile on their lips and a samosa in their mouth.

By the way the Mumbai Indians won the match, but we were not there to see it. As soon as the result became evident, there was an exodus. Having been exposed to mass behavior for so many hours we just followed like lemmings, and read the result of the match in next day’s papers.