On a depressing Sunday morning on the 28th of Nov, 2010, I blurted out a piece of the truth of my life – that I am an Internet Addict. It’s been quite a while since then and in the meanwhile, I have let the whole Internet thingy dominate my personal and family space so much so that I have even started disliking anything and everything that ain’t the Internet.
If you’re wondering how life has changed since that last post, here is the low-down:
I No Longer Watch TV: Last year I bought a Sony Bravia LCD TV to let sanity creep into my life, but it pathetically failed to keep the momentum. The last time I’d switched on my TV was like two weeks ago when I flipped through channels like the pages of a boring magazine. As a matter of fact, I have free access to a local cable TV service that comes with my monthly subscription to their paid Internet package. Lucky Me? Not at all. The free cable TV beams a bunch of fucked-up locals TV channels, some boring national TV channels, some irritating news channels (where they always have some shit news to break to us), a couple of movie channels (that show repeated movies until you’re bored to death), and music channels with less “music” and more bullshit. I have every right to switch off the TV and move on to a digital pasture.
If you think I’m an eccentric, ask those guys why they invented Smart TV with Facebook Twitter, and Skype integrated. Yes, I’m also planning to try it out, but I highly doubt if it’s gonna change my life for the better.
I No Longer Watch Movies: Yes, I’ve been a movie freak for a long time. I bought a Sony Blu-ray player and a dozen of DVDs last year anticipating an enhanced cinematic experience, but the bubble burst pretty quickly. I’m a huge non-believer in modern Bollywood movies and I live in a city that doesn’t have any cine multiplex to show the newly released Hollywood movies. Even though you want to watch an overhyped Bollywood flick on weekends, you can’t. To begin with, there’s a lot of struggle involved in watching the movie at the cinema halls, unless you’re illegally buying tickets from the stinking black marketers. Oh, you want to wait for a week for the hype to wear off? Forget it! The theatre owners will take the movie off their screen before you know it.
Being an Internet addict, I’m only left to wonder how long more I need to wait until they let me watch the newly released movies on my HDTV using some sorta premium account. Is it gonna be a reality soon?
I Don’t Have An Offline Life: I simply hate having an offline life. I try staying connected with my emails, my Facebook profile, my Facebook Fanpage, and my Twitter profile wherever I go. On my recent trip to Bangkok, I told my friends to make sure we book hotels that offer free wifi. We checked in and found that their free wifi can be used only by one person at a time. With my friends being equally addicted to the Internet, I had to sacrifice and suffer digitally. When I entered the MBK Shopping Center in Bangkok, my iPhone detected multiple WiFi hotspots but sadly, they were all private and I couldn’t access the Internet.
Sound weird, right? Well, go further down and you will see worse things happening to me…
Internet Invaded My Romance, Dinner, and Even Washroom: “How can you NOT be on Facebook?” I asked surprised a random girl recently when I was beginning to date her online. Well, it’s pretty normal for some people to live without Facebook and use the Web only when it’s necessary even though the Facebook has crossed over 750 million users as you read and still counting. It turns out I can’t bring myself to date girls unless they have an active online life. Duh!
“What would you like to have for dinner?”, asked my friend when we were at a posh Indian restaurant in Bangkok. But, before I was able to locate my favorite Palak Paneer on the menu, my eyes had already detected a signboard that reads, “Free Internet Wi-Fi”. I immediately went to the reception and asked them for the password. At the cost of exaggerating it, my propensity to seek a Wi-Fi hotspot is akin to a normal human’s desire to seek a washroom at a random location when they want to respond to nature’s call while it’s kinda overdue.
What’s the most private space people can have in their life? Inside their washroom, right? Wrong! Like those millions of Smartphone users around the planet, I too tend to carry my iPhone to my washroom every time I have to enter the washroom. Thanks to the Wi-Fi in my room, I’m able to sit through the shitting process without batting an eyelid and browsing through my emails and social updates. Heck, I’ve even replied to too many business-critical emails from there.
Blogging to Survival: Well, different people blog for different reasons: some blog for money, some for fame, some for sharing their knowledge. But, I do it for survival. I don’t write for anyone, I write for myself. So, I wouldn’t care if a post is good, bad, or ugly; I’d just blog my feelings regardless of what they are. My blog is online and out there for people to see, read or subscribe to it if they find my ranting of value to them. Some of you read it in disguise, some of you comment on it, and others simply choose to ignore it. I’m fine with you all. The last time I wrote an angry post (which is now private), my brother called me up to figure everything was right in my life. I said, “now that I’ve blogged it, it seems right”. He was calm.
I really want to blog, blog as fuck, blog the hell out of it. I think of titles all the time, wherever I am, whatever I do. At times, I note them down, at times they escape my memories. But blame it on my hectic schedule or professional compulsions, I get less time to blog. As it stands, I have about half a dozen blogs to attend to including my guest blogging priorities. This makes it hard for me to blog as, at times, I get utterly frustrated to find myself too tired to write a post that I have conceived for quite a while. At the cost of exaggerating it, I’d compare my helplessness with the feminine worries when her menstruation period is overdue or when she carries a baby beyond 9 months.
So what do I do when I really find no time to blog? I get up in the wee hours to write a post, which is precisely what I’m doing right now.
Hope you’ve enjoyed my ranting. Even if you haven’t, well, there’s always the next post in the offing all the time.