Being Nostalgic!!

I am Sorry for being nostalgic once again, but seriously I have no set of words for highlighting relations, future, politics, Bollywood (Salmaan Khan), Cricket (Rohit Sharma) etc. as of now till date, when i got to know that they are going to shut down Orkut on 30^th September 2014.

Haan Mere Baap ka kuch nahi ja raha usme par fir bhi…….

Once upon a time, there was no high speed Internet, the mention of the word apple still highlights up images of a fruit, the forward thinking Xerox ”STD” stores charged one rate for domestic email and another for international email, intellectuals did not have the luxury of appearing erudite by reading Wikipedia just in time for an argument, and research was still done in libraries.

And Yahoo! was Salman Khan, the 100-crore Hero in the room. It was your browser home page, the post box where you got your email (there were so few that you even read the spam) and the search box where you typed in “Jessica Simpson sexy pictures”. Sure, some people used Hotmail too, perhaps under the mistaken impression that the mail you would get there would be of the hot type, but still Yahoo! was the most popular online destination. It was said that the people behind Yahoo! were Shammi Kapoor fans, but since there was no Wikipedia then, we could never confirm if this was true. But we assumed it was.

It was around this time that many started discovering this other Yahoo! feature.

Yahoo! Chat or simply the Yahoo!

I mean, Desibaba was all well and good, but there is only so much that juggled pictures of Karishma Kapoor and stories of the “Pooja Bhabhi” series can do for a 9^th or 10th class boy individual. One then desired the company of a real person of the opposite gender, and so the thirsty generation waited, till the night fell and parents fell asleep, to fire up their dial-up modems, the ‘tu-tu-tu tee tee tee’ hunting tone making them worry with the anticipation of the hunt, as they quietly dive into the world of  Yahoo! Chat rooms.

17′s Love. 20’s Love. Adult themed chat rooms that only one’s friends visited.

Clicking on ids by wiered names like naughtyboymanish, mischeiviousmood, johny2u4uwithu etc. initiating contact (virtual), waiting for replies, and then if anybody made contact, to proceed with the opening move that came to be known as a/s/l (Age/sex/location).

Frequent synonyms of Yahoo Chat, and I can only speak from the male perspective, knew the rules. Rule number 2 was that ‘sweetgirl123, angelgirl1988 and bustylusty4u’ and similarly provocative ids were all boys, who wanted you to click on links. Rule number 3 was that one could use Salmaan Khan’s picture as your own only when chatting in UK and US rooms. And rule number 1 was that any female sounding id who initiated chat contact with a male id was either as a boy or a jealous girl friend under another name trying to validate her boy’s honesty or, this was most common, a man. 

For some reason I could easily relate, a large number of men would chat as women in Yahoo! Perhaps they wanted to experience the sensation of being wanted, a sensation many used to a life of lonely desperation never quite experienced. Perhaps they suffered from the prison syndrome, where you no longer care if it is a man or a woman. Whatever may have been the real reason, the things to remember was that if something was too good to be true, it definitely was, literally and cyberly.

Yahoo! Chat was not just about making connections in the great beyond. It fuelled the economy, building, together with gaming and porn, the cybercafe business in India. Manoj Chattani* gang would come to cybercafes, in groups, and huddle over one Celeron machine (Pentium was not in action at that time), giggling and nudging each other, bags placed strategically on laps. As chat rooms became voice enabled, communities started to build around Chat rooms, with people fighting for the mic, some singing and some shouting random abuse in colorful language for no good reason.

It was organic, it was funny, it was fun, and yes, once in a while, people did find that perfect match.

Reaching 3^rd Semester the charm and desperation for Yahoo! began to die under the onslaught of taking admission in VITS. Before we knew it, Yahoo! Chat had become like Jaitwara station, not maintained, left to rot and with suspicious people hanging about, looking here and there.

The people had to be somewhere of course. So they began flocking to the next big thing, social networking. The age of anonymity and multiple identities had come to an end, to be replaced by a more conventional interaction ethic that more resembled the real world.

Orkut, with its profile pictures and real names, was considered more trustworthy than the wild culture of Yahoo!, despite the profusion of profiles with Sania Mirza pictures. Hence it was Hit!!

A new vocabulary came into existence. Friend Request, Allow, Deny, Blocking, Scrapping, Testimonials etc. (kya kya tha, main bhi bhool gaya) the politics of which would have overwhelmed even Modi.

With picture albums that were open for public viewing initially, one could spend rainy afternoons surfing through real pictures of girls, and then, send them scraps asking for “franship” with the goal being to evolve the “franship” into “labhsip”. Sure the English was bad, and ppl missed vowels and used caps and small letters indiscriminately, and scrapping for no reason, forwarded sms, 100^th scrap congratulations desire to connect across boundaries of space and time, and nowhere was this better expressed than in the scarpbook of pretty girl who would wake up in the morning to find scraps left by total strangers.

But then somewhere down the line, Facebook opened itself to the world, with its better user interface and its locked down albums. People started forgetting Orkut faster than their mates, and Orkut once dutifully maintained and updated, became like a ghost post.

Not that Orkut could not have been saved, Not that Yahoo! Chat could not have been saved. We never wanted to be in same age ever. We never figured out our expectations on discovering.

The golden age of the Net was now officially over. Things no longer existed for the sheer pleasure of being there. Power had passed from the hands of engineers and scientists and intellectual adventurers to the MBA types. Yahoo! Chat was too anonymous to mark presence through targeted advertisements. Orkut was better in that respect but it had not been designed from the beginning keeping in mind a commercial strategy, and the cost of re architecting it was considered too shity.

So Google built the Orkut replacement Google+, the Rohit Sharma of social networks, supposedly very awesome but no one knows what it is good for. Facebook though won as the social network war, monitoring and mining everything you do. What used to be innocent questions like “What are you wearing?” during Yahoo! Chat days are now commerce driven information processing queries, with Facebook knowing not only what you are wearing now but also what you will wear tomorrow.

No doubt today we pine. Today we weep. For Yahoo! Chat and Orkut, but more than that, for those kinder, simpler times, when corporations did not know what we got off to, when people were users, and not market strategy that drive stock valuations.

Yet the two shall remain in our memories, in hours of lost productivity, in seconds of strategic screen minimizations in floating scraps of conversations and in shades of joyful perhaps naughty memories.

Goodbye old friends. Sail gently into the night. The lights will be turned off for good.:-)