Being 'De-activated'...

[Text and Sketches by D.B.]

Que 01: “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account?”

Ans: “Yes.”

Que 02: “These friends will miss you. Would you like to send them a message before you deactivate your account?”

Ans: “Enough!!!! Arghhhh…. I am not dying!!!!”

Well, that was me talking to my FB account a year ago. Yes… you guessed it right… it was the ‘I-deactivated-my-account’ stage of my life. One year… quite wonderful! First of all I would like to declare that I MADE IT!!! Yeay!! This is for those who think that one cannot live without FB – Well, c’mon! I just did! Before you start making any presumptions, let me clear that no one challenged me to do that. And I won’t even say that I did it because of ‘personal reasons’ coz that would be too lame! I’ve got reasons which actually helped me keeping myself ‘free’ for real important things in life, like eating, sleeping.. etc. But eventually I realized that there are drawbacks of it too, for instance, you cannot react to your friend who tells you the latest joke from the “Trolled” series… Well… all the mathematics is been done below!

So, after being in ‘social-networking-solitary-confinement’ for one year, I bring to you the five-points that helped me live my life while ‘Being Deactivated…’

[DISCLAIMER: I do not have any personal grudges with Mark Zuckerberg and his product. Neither do I promote the ‘Deactivate your account’ function of FB.]

[WARNING: Deactivating your FB account can cause serious complications in your personal and professional life. It doesn’t make you ‘Cool’]

You Get Life!

Picture this! You are on for a morning walk (with your DSLR). You saw fresh dew on leaves. You capture that with your ‘instrument’. You come home. ‘Upload done’. By the next morning you’ll be flooded with hundreds of likes and thousands of comments! Many of them don’t even matter to you and most of the people who liked the pic do not even belong to you directly or in worst cases have never met you!

Now, imagine yourself without an FB account and picture the scene again! You go for the walk – WITHOUT the DSLR because you know that your account is not there! You end up gazing the dew and capturing them with your ‘natural’ lenses and return back home! Story ends!

Now only YOU ‘Liked’ it and am sure you’ll love that.

And those who just felt that they used to do this, stop sharing your ‘photography’ talent with amateurs on FB, instead move on to some ‘real’ photography websites looking for good photographers.

You get social – well, with your family!

How many times you missed that call from Dad? Or How many times you just forgot to respond to your Mum when she was calling you for the dinner? And why? Coz you were busy making someone on the ‘chat’ happy…? Right? This IS social networking, I agree but what about the ‘family time’ that you used to have with your family?

Well, if this is sounding a bit ‘lecture’ types then, when was the last time you met your ‘chat-wali’ friend, the same for whom you kept your mom waiting? You might have been chatting daily but then is that doing any good to your relationship rather than making your English worse than ever and letting you use :) instead of getting a smile on your face? Think about it…

Know ‘MY’ location

No. This is not the name of any function on FB (actually, I don’t know, maybe by the time I post this on Blog, its there) But, this is what you offer to your friends for free.. “ABC is at Bus stop feeling waiting”, “XYZ is at Panwala feeling red”, etc. etc. I mean… Why? Why do you want people to know where the hell you are and even if you want to share with someone in particular, god dam it, call him/her! Why to put it on your Wall???

It is addictive... I guess!

Let’s start the cycle. You start your laptop with some purpose, most probably, some important work in mind. You open your browser window and you start doing your work, say, checking your mail. You think again and before entering your email id you ‘feel-like’ signing into your FB account. Now its working on the other Tab. You turn to the first tab and check your mail. Suddenly you realize that when you signed into FB there were 10 notifications. You leave the mail tab.

The FB-Cycle

You open up the notifications, check them one by one. Like the pictures of your friends, comment on the other ones. Then you get like from someone on the comment you just made, and then the person on whose profile you commented replies back. You like his comment and suddenly someone likes your profile pic, you check all the likes you got till date and finds that the person you wanted to like the pic didn’t like it yet. You wait for it for a while and then you “poke” that person and that person knowing that you seek something never replies or sends a message but pokes you back! And finally you start waiting for the pokes also… 

And the cycle moves on! The email Tab… well you forget about that!

Brings back your fundamental Rights and Duties!

I don’t know how many of you would agree with me on this one but being deactivated from FB made me realize and thus follow my fundamental rights and duties. The duties which I was supposed to do myself, in person, but started taking help from this ‘extremely intelligent’ piece of technology. For instance, birthday wishes, attending family functions and ceremonies, extending my regards to someone or even proposing a girl!!! (Well, the last one’s been added to raise the TRP only)

Just ask yourself – how would you like if someone sends you a gift or a greeting and you come to know that its been already shared with thousands of people? I mean, FB does that openly! Your best friend shares a pic telling you that you are his/her best friend and if you see to its bottom right, its written that its already been shared some 2344…. Times! I mean where is the innovation in emotions nowadays? If you really think that person is worth knowing that fact then tell him/her in person! Same happens on Mother’s day, Father’s day, Puppy’s day and on all those days!

DIY dude! Do It Yourself… Bring back the ‘real’ compassion and love…

The story would have ended if it was all about leaving FB… but no! In the course of one year I also realized why you need it.

It keeps you updated about everything! Be it educational, professional, commercial, political, or anything, it keeps you up-to-date! It is to ‘connect’ with people of course and you can just stay connected and get updates of friends you never met in last decade. It helps you promote things; ask me and my fellow authors, we are promoting PT! (Wink) It helps your business progress! In times of adversities, of course, these websites turn out to be a great help! It is a great platform for sharing important stuff, especially when websites around the world are connected to it. At last, it helps you resolve distances, it brings people closer and speaking technically – it IS a very good medium to store your memories as it provides lots of ‘cloud’ space.

Deactivating from FB didn’t take the Author any closer to the ‘Cool’ tag. The fact is even if you deactivate there are very few who would appreciate that and it will not be termed as ‘Cool’ rather they’ll call that strange! Returning to FB proves that it is not ‘leave-able’ but the Author would advise you to use the technology in a way that your Life still remains ‘livable’.

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More than Words : Avaak

"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another." - Atlas Shrugged

The one true form of art that can lead on to a catastrophe of revelations; the one true gesture that makes one do the most regretful actions they shall ever- is the need to – Express. 

Yes, well… Lady Positive is in the Dark Room my friends! And yes, I shall drown you with me!!! 

Love is truly a game. It is that insufferable need for us humans to fall into the arms of anything and everything that makes us “feel alive”. Yeah well sometimes jumping into a pot full of hot oil can fry the bit-Jesus out of your alive-ass. Just because it looks like love, it may not be so. Like those times when we fake a fever to get out of going to school.

It’s amazing how the overwhelm of winning a game gets to any relationship from the very beginning. Who called first? Was it you texted her? Or she who tried to make the first conversation, who calls and at what time of the day, who has a bigger phone bill? Who sent whom the first friend request? Who has liked whose images? 

Bereft of subtlety and lacking the very privacy of relationships, “this guy I met”, “this girl whom I’m seeing these days” becomes the coffee table discussion among friends. The commoditization of a person begins. We express…prophesize…gossip…and bitch.

But love is not something to be expressed. Not because it can’t be or doesn’t need to be, but because when you truly and completely love someone, the precise moment when you are to express it, all sense in you escapes. The only things that come to your mind are the bare minimum words to sustain a feeling so immense that words run scared. In fact, I learnt from a very dear friend recently… how immense under-expressed love can be.  

Love expressed is so much sweeter to the ears than love unexpressed. However, nothing can substitute the pang of affection you feel for someone who did something for you while you were looking the other way. 

Something that you came across days, maybe months or even years later from a stranger or a distant friend; something you know you will always be indebted to them for but you were far too eager to “hear” it rather than “see” what the person did for you. Love is something that is the hardest to explain. And yet, we long for more and more of the verbal expression, choking the other for words.

I also at this point, with no offense to feminists like me, would like to point out how the two sexes are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to “talking”. To most of my guy friends, merely “talking” or yapping isn’t expression. It runs much deeper. 

Picking you up from your workplace and dropping you home, getting your phone recharged when you’re busy running around in local trains, waiting for your call when you are away travelling, talking to your friends and getting to know them, finding comfort among your people, making you a part of their friends’ circle… 

...making sure they are the last person who’s voice you hear before you fall asleep and the first person who hears your groggy voice in the morning, waiting for you to calm down when you’re unreasonably cranky and touchy, and running to you for solace…these count for more than words. 

I am still astonished how very few of us women enjoy silent conversations. Why so? How can one not notice any of these? And if we do… how the hell can we still demand for words of expression instead of actions. 

“You never tell me enough”?!! Do they need to?  Okay, maybe yes… when it really matters. When nothing can substitute the feeling of hearing those words but excessive expression and repetition is like cheap advertisement that relies only on nagging the audience into memorizing the words.

Love and hate are far too heavy and strong to be expressed fully. This takes me to Gregory David Robert’s ‘Shantaram’, “Fear drives a man’s mouth dry, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no real literature: real fear and real hate have no words.” (Ch. 18, Pg. 414). 

I would parallel it to Love. Real love has no real literature too. It’s probably the denial or deprivation of that love that makes for good literature- like real tragedy… not reveling in it. Reveling in it is intrinsic. Like music.