Internet Friendships

Mr. A – Hi.
Miss B – Hi
Mr. A – a s l please.
Miss B – 23, female mumbai, you?
Mr.A – 24, male New Delhi.

And thus starts every conversation in a chat room. Where and how far the conversation leads depends upon the chatting abilities of the two.

I remember when internet had first come to my city in Udupi, Karnataka in the late 1990’s. It was like this new craze, this new pass time. All of us became very interested in the internet. All of us had the need, this desire to open new email accounts, send an email to a friend even if u saw him for 6 hours a day. Visit websites and learn about the world of the internet. I mean it was a craze. Many of the youngsters were crazy about the internet.

But guess which site became more popular? Yes yes the chat rooms. Guys, mostly guys would login to their respective accounts, go to rooms of their choosing and look for girls to chat with. Any user they found, whom they suspected to be girls, they went after. Now how many girls actually came online, no one would ever know. But guys would really be persistent.

And then there were those guys who never found any girls to chat with, and decided to vent their frustrations on all the other guys on the internet by posing as girls. They were those kinds who would derive immense pleasure in posing as girls and sending the boys on a wild goose chase. They would even suddenly have this brilliant idea of chatting wit a girl using a fictitious female user ID. Some lucky guys actually found to their delight that other girls really were very talkative once they found out that you are a girl, they would have a long chat with this girl and after a long conversation would have this feeling of introducing himself as a guy, only to find out that the girl he was talking to was also another guy.

May be this phenomenon still exists, I would never know because I stopped entering chat rooms a long time ago. Well, after a short time some people like yours truly do smarten up. I too would visit chat rooms, find people to chat with, have long conversations and later find out the person in front of you was bluffing. Somehow… how would you put it… real friends, those people around you, provided more meaning to life than the ones in the chat rooms. Very rarely you would find someone really nice, only to never see or hear from that person again. Or you would meet someone you liked before, whom u chatted with once and enjoyed and would be embarrassed to find out that the person didn’t remember you. Of course since that person would have chatted with hundreds of people in between.

So chat rooms I avoided. Any unknown person sending me a message would be ignored.

Then came social websites like facebook, orkut, yahoo 360. here you could actually see the person’s pictures, their profiles and other personal information the user put about herself/himself.
I liked yahoo 360 in the beginning. This was and still is a site wherein you could post your thoughts like a personal diary. I met lots of interesting people in here. People who had a gift for words, people who had lived interesting lives, It was very interesting. Many people would post some incident about their lives, even trivial ones and this would take you in a nostalgic journey to that page of your life that you had forgotten about.

But unfortunately there was a 4-5 month time lag in between where I couldn’t access the internet as much as I used to. When I logged back in to the site I found that many of the people there had also stopped updating their pages. I felt a little strange, like not knowing what had become of them.

This made me wonder again about internet friendships. Why would I look for friendships from unknown people on the internet.

Real life friendships I had learnt were not meant to be kept for a long time. As one of my close friends always says, promises are meant to be broken. I wonder if this thought applies to friendship too. At least on the internet. The same friend even talked about relationships having an expiry date.

I have lost count of how many people I became friendly with on the net who just upped and disappeared. Many of those friends whom I met after long time were just not enthusiastic enough to continue where we had left. This applied to me too, because I rarely remembered what subject we used to chat about.

Well. I think there are very few genuinely friendly people in the world. The kind who would … you know… keep friendship for long. In my real life I have just one friend whom I can say has been my old friend since we have been in contact since the day we met. But the others… come and go, some do reappear but its hard to be remain in contact.

I think we all look for some particular quality in the person we are chatting with. Some like to chat with funny people, some prefer to talk to naughty ones, most of them prefer raunchy ones. Most of us just need someone to talk to just to feel good I suppose.

You can always make friends through the internet, very few of them will remain with you for long. Some may actually become real, in front of ur face friends too. You will see life in various forms through them, some of them will make you even remember your childhood, some may need ur advice, some could give you advice. You will find all kinds of people with all kinds of life experiences.

If you are looking for permanent friendship then don’t keep your hopes up. But if u want to learn about people and their lives, internet is awesome.

((( sorry for the abrupt ending)))