Facebook follies

Very silly things, yet some or most of us fall for them at least once. Here are a few meaning less Facebook follies many love to indulge in :

Who is your secret admirer.

What Obama says about you. (I would care what Obama thinks I say about him)

Who were you in your previous births.

How many times you have been friend with someone in previous births.

What kind of person you are (as if I never knew, thanks facebook for revealing it).

Which Ramayan or Mahabharat character you are.

And many more, with more to come. There is an inherent childhood or childishness hidden inside us, which manifests itself at the right place and time. Facebook knows this tendency of the social animal called man (and woman too) and fully uses it to its advantage.

Yet nothing ever beats the real thing in life, when I get nostalgic in remembering the fun we had doing many silly stuff, especially during the early stages of our life. It's said in Hindi - BADI BADI KHUSIAN HAI CHHOTI CHHOTI BATON MAIN - big happiness comes from doing small, or rather things.

 

No kidding, but we kids back home used to compete with one another how farthest one can pee in open air, under sparkling blue sky. A champion among us could propel it to almost 10 feet. These days with progressing age and softening of the prostrate muscles one can barely pee in a jet stream.

During my days back home in India, peeing outside was something very common thing, often unavoidable. Once during a trip to a SARKARI (government) office, I grabbed couple of glasses of sugarcane juice (those ubiquitous vendors stand outside, their stacks of sugarcanes barely visible from their liberal coating of flies).

 

Soon my bladder was full. Desperate to empty it, I was frantically looking for a restroom (bathroom) when an approaching bystander pointed me towards the trunk of a huge tree. I looked around the tree for anything close to a bathroom, but could not locate any.

Soon my eyes settled on the water soaked streak, starting from about 3 feet above the tree trunk, trickling down to the ground beneath it. It gave me enough hint of the bathroom's location. Though pissed off at the sight, unable to hold on to my piss any longer, I contributed my share of Urea fertilizer to the tree. (Many walls and their surroundings back home carry the stigma from rivulets of urine. One innovative person came up with the idea of painting a picture of Lord Shiva on the wall. The dryness surrounding the wall bore the efficacy of his creativity, as no one wanted to earn the wrath of our whimsical Mahadev).

 

In our college hostel, there was this guy who after consuming a full bowl of CHANNA (chick peas) once took a challenge to extinguish a candle with his fart. He tried few times, but forget about extinguishing, he could barely flicker the flames. Watching him attempting, I never laughed so much in my life.

 

Would any of these Facebook follies match these unadulterated fun. As in Ice age the mammals migrated south, we are migrating towards to a virtual world created by Social media. But however creative the social media can get, its virtual world can never be the substitute for the real stuff, nor bridge the gap for real feelings.