Saturday, September 25, 2010

Socially Un-Networked

Back from a holiday to Dubai and India - visited parents, relatives and friends and dined, drank and laughed at old jokes and new. Two weeks just flew past and here I am back in Brisbane with some good memories and a massive jet lag. Back to work - but I guess what are sick days for after all :-P

Last month J was all excited about her first trip back home after marriage and was happily shopping for little things to take back for everyone, basically just small mementos or fridge magnets or stuffed toys for all her little cousins. We had different classifications such as “gift cousins”, “chocolate cousins”, “only a phone call cousins” and “lets meet them next time cousins”, making sure she didn’t miss out anyone etc etc.. In the mean time she had also announced her countdown to the start of the holiday on Facebook. Not much time passed before she was contacted by various ‘friends’ here at Brisbane with a list of things that they wanted to be brought back from India. She being ever obliging agreed unwillingly. Pretty soon after the list was compiled our trip was ending up like a delivery service. Even wondered if we should change over from Emirates to DHL Super Jumbo.. hmm. We had people coming over and dropping things off for us to take to Dubai and extremely pushy offers to be dropped off and picked up from the airport. Finally I had enough and put my foot down and said I am not brining in anything from Dubai or India. We had one set of guys who had their two year old son call us up and ask us if we could bring him the milk powder from Kerala – and this was after some heavy prompting from his pushy mum in the background. The extend some people go to is unbelievable *sigh*

It has been two weeks since we got back and there is no news from our milk powder friends. The book that they also requested for, which required me driving down to a different village in India at 10 PM at night through what seemed a ghost town in order for me to pick up, is still lying here at our home in Brisbane. I guess it wasn’t that urgent at all. Oh well..

Soon we got alerts in email with “you were tagged” on FB. So there were caught having fun with some of our friends who we had met during the short trip. This left the others friends who are also on facebook, wondering why we didn’t bother visiting them or giving them a ring, let alone take picture with them. Wonder if we will hear from them again. And to top it all off one of them even tagged us in a picture of a stuffed toy we had gifted their kids with a caption “from J with love”. This must have left some impression on the other “non gift” friends and in Kerala this is enough material for starting a family feud.

So I guess we have been socially un networked from a few friends…




I read an interesting article about Mark Zuckerberg who had to pay USD 65 million to keep a bunch of uni students quiet about them claiming that he stole their idea while working together on a same project. Apparently Mark delayed the project they were working on and in the meantime launched Facebook which had a striking similarity. Difference they called it “dating” and Mark called it “networking”. Talk about play with words.


And the other talk of the town is the commonwealth games about which the less said the better.

7 comments:

The Ketchup Girl said...

sheeeeeeshh! Milk powder?! DM, why did you even agree at the first place. And don't even mention FB. Its scary- last time's trip to India, the pictures, tagging, comments and all that got me into serious trouble with so many. Now my wall is off limits and pictures visible to just a few good and sensible friends. Good you had fun..nothing like home! Hey its summerrr!!

Casuarina said...

Hehehe...people are just like that...insecure over trivial things...don't lose sleep over it all...the real, meaningful relationships in life will always be unconditional after all.

As for social networking sites, I've learned to censor anything and everything I put into them...the virtual memory is infinite (and unforgiving)!

Discovering M said...

hey guys !!

My walls are not off limit yet - but its coming soon I guess. Its hard to make a move without some one alerting the whole network.. and worst part is I cant even "not be on FB" because then I have no idea where / what pics / videos of mine are going around.. ..sheesh !! Have to find a balance somehow.


Glad that you two drop by every now and then.. I haven't read your blogs for a while to see what are you are upto.. will do so soon :)

and yea KG - summer is here and loads of rain too.. I love Brisbane.

Unknown said...

haha I know this feeling. a classmate's mom got her entire house to our house to be sent to her boy cos he was quite obviously unable to survive without namkeen and such like in university. Some people just don't get it :)

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The Ketchup Girl said...

Hey DM, u n your wife hv been on my mind for a while now.. Hope the floods didn't affect the suburb u were in. Let us know! Hope u guys are safe n well. Do give a shout out if u need anything!

Discovering M said...

Hey KG,

We survived :). Thanks for thinking of us. I will post some pics of the floods soon. It was quite an experience.

We had to vacate and crash a friends place in North Brisbane for a few days. The phone lines are still not back on but all else is okay !