Twitter

As I may have written ad-nauseum to you SMS, E-Mails and now Twitter are the disembodied forms of modern communication. Texting, Tweets and its ilk are reducing communications to zero, but at the same time increasing the speed of messaging and like nuclear energy may one day consume us homo-sapiens!! A small tweet created a din and consumed IPL Modi and now many of our garden variety of bureaucrats and actors who have ascended with a lot of luck and toxic narcissism have also joined the band wagon.

Is the Internet turning us into a nation of imbeciles? There is an elegant elusiveness to these inane messages strewn all over cyberspace like some pithy notes from outer space, floating like a cloud of volcanic ash from the Iceland’s erupting volcano. In the past our exchange of letters were vivid, lithely drawn narratives pulsating with insights and intuitive reasoning, that brought to our mind vivacious vignettes of images and glimpses reflected in the writings.

Today it seems we are all “denied old age” as our expiry dates are shortened and everything has shorter life cycles (except debt and EMI’s) jobs, love, family, belongings, loyalty and relationships. It reminds me of the days when miniskirts first appeared on the horizon like the blogs, then it gave way to micro minis and now microblogs or twitter, both hiding more than it revealed. The length of relationships or commitment to an organization or family has reduced along with other spans for everything. These new fangled tools like E-reader, Kindle etc are infantilizing the minds of generation next, who are finding it difficult to empathize and are facing an identity crisis half boy half man and each phase is a transaction including career, marriage, family,etc are treated like a cab ride, short is the key and in thing. Yeow the cat got their tongue and the twitter generation is not old enough to understand long stretches of prose; its speed dating and multitasking all the way to leave a carbon footprint on cyberspace. How can you expect this generation who have no time to sleep (24/7) to smell the flowers greet the zeitgeist? You need a minimal amount of time to be creative/productive and accumulate knowledge.

Internet tweets are not long enough to size up a woman let alone have a quickie at best it’s a brief boob gazing job before twittering away (adobe acrobat) and with the virtual reality situation even the Bangkok syndrome is disappearing. Great discussions cannot be held on Face book chat as they are seldom linear, they don’t progress logically like your embedded software, as they digress meander all over your mindscape. You cannot put complex thoughts into one-liners - good conversations are like having a drink with a cigar, it takes time to percolate and you have to relax savor the seconds like listening to music (Bach/Beethoven) only then can you come away rejuvenated. I used to be charming in my youth even the dogs would follow me around, and proximity without intimacy was like Dante’s inferno (hell) but now if I don’t acquire some internet skills neither the girls nor company wants me, and since my last published book is an endangered species on Amazon I will end up in “jobless anonymous” very soon. I have perfected the art of parental non-interference that my kids now treat me like a pet and have long divorced me from the list of parents. Oh! My Blackberry is vibrating welcome to the 21st century, let me log off now.