So I won’t intrude in your life and you don’t intrude in mine. Facebook is a voyeur’s paradise. Every month I get at least one request from a person I never spoke with in college – mostly my first post grad college – random women who used to sit at the other corner of the class ,short fat overdressed richie-rich girl from koregaon park, mind-numbingly dumb-now-married-to-some-NRI girl who exchanged one line with me in two years, the guy who gossiped about me in a not-so-nice way, the ex’s close friend who I was fond of but now don’t really care about, etc etc. What is with this bunch? The bunch I don’t give a shit about, the bunch that makes me squirm when I run into them on some not-so-fateful day in a crowded market. Why can’t you walk away? Look the other way and pretend that we don’t know each other? Because really I don’t. Apart from knowing your name and that we breathed in the same space for those two years, I really don’t know shit about you. I don’t understand this compulsive need for people to come and make small talk, really pointless pleasantries are shared when all that both parties are checking out is who has put on more weight and who looks more miserable. Numbers are exchanged – this annoying age of cell phones, how can you not have one, even my plumber has one – and you are trapped – you have to give your number. But then again that’s not really important because in spite of all the fake smiles and the “ooh we must catch up” business, no message gets dropped, no calls happen, so after getting that missed call also I don’t bother to save it. Let it fade away in the next few days from my list of calls and hope to never run into that person again.
So why do I hate meeting / accepting facebook requests / chatting with these people so much? I don’t know. Maybe it is because I had the most horrible two years of my life in that shithole course. Pune is no student’s paradise - it is an orgy of recklessness and pettiness. Woman stabs woman over a boy. Boy fucks girl and then he fucks her best friend. Roommate gives a crying shoulder and then complains about the weight. Boy wakes up in the morning and says he is commitment phobic – never mind that at night his brain was in his balls. Almost-best friend suddenly appears in boy’s room in his night clothes. Thankfully the ‘almost’ turns to ‘never’. And the usual jhingbang. Really there is nothing so liberating about a college and a place like that. If anything, that place makes you question your own sense of self. It makes you feel helplessly trapped. Anything that made me not want to face my own self in the mirror is pretty much better-best deleted. And so I try to delete the episodes, the chapters, the primary and the auxiliary characters that are associated with the phase. But no – facebook is a bitch that will keep trying to make you get in touch with people you are actively trying to erase. I wonder sometimes if erasing my account is the answer. I don’t know. I like being in the loop with people I know and want to know further. Why should I be the one erasing myself? Talking of erasing, there have been recent erasures which have surprised me, not because the erasing happened but that it happened so easily. Kurtz is a person I used to know who is trying very hard to mend his old ways and turn into a new leaf. But I think spring is over and soon it will be time for autumn and things will begin to change colour and fall. For me he is fallen already because flimsy leaves are fated to fall one day or the other. His flimsiness is legendary really. One day K wants to be friends and the other day he finds an easy way to get out of it. One day he sees me as this unrealistic image in his head and the other day it shatters so easily he walks over it with sigh of relief. I don’t know whether erasing is an activity he indulges in frequently but give a man a rubber and he will find ways to use it almost immediately. As for me, I’d like to think of my two years of that crappy phase as an unpleasant parchment on which I have begun the process of palimpsest. Because I don’t just like to erase, I like to rewrite.
