Dec 7, 1998
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NETIZENS Web Junkies They speak a different lingo, have no social life, families find them strange and friends feel they're distant. They belong to the cult of mouse-happy Indians which lives for the internet. By Vijay Jung Thapa and Sheela Raval
The screen is crying, the circuits are full of tears. It's 11.30 at night and it's raining emotions again at #hotspot (pronounced hash hotspot), a visual-aided cyber watering hole for the South-side gang -- a group of nihilistic Net-whining surfers in Delhi (South actually stands for south Delhi). K<a>bir, whose visual marker on the screen is a Leonardo DiCaprio head, is mooning about how HotcoveX, a brainy bimbo (a techie head with a lush, naked body) who cruises the seedier parts of the Def Squad sites, isn't responding to his flaming hot e-mails of undivided love. The DiCaprio head sits forlorn on the top of a white and full moon, occasionally sending down showers of crystal tears that hit the bottom of the screen with accompanying alphabets that go <-S-P-L-A-A-T->. His on-line buddies, meanwhile, tap their worn-smooth keyboards sympathetically. AmaR69 (whose visual marker on the screen is a werewolf) types in: "Love is a {{{{{bum trip}}}}} dude. IMHO (a cyber abbreviation for 'in my humble opinion'): there are just too many babes out there and too little virtual time." SammyDoZ (with a monster head and an axe sticking out of it): "Yeah, kick off your shoes, get hold of some Phenobarbitals, download some Erich Segal ... and soon you'll be back on the circuits, witty and charming, being Yo'ed by all the foxy women of the Web." And so it goes on. For hours. It takes a global village -- or more specifically, an on-line community -- to buoy K<a>bir. Logged off and in real time, K<a>bir is Kabir Sahani, 23, a shy and reticent individual who lives alone and has just started a career in copywriting. He swears he has no real friends and surviving relatives -- a mother and elder brother live far away in Jamshedpur. For many, three to four hours of surfing on the Net is as good a social life as it gets. But for Sahani it's the only life he has. A hundred on-line hours every week is normal -- sometimes though it gets intense and he has at times spent 48 hours staring at screens of scrolling text and graphics. His on-line buddies, he insists, are his only family. They may sound whacky, talk nerdish, act a bit irreverent at times -- but they're fiercely loyal to each other. "If you take them away, I'd just curl up and die," he points out.
Sahani is part of a growing sub-group of people (among the 20 lakh Internet users in India today) who don't just surf on the Net but live for it. Call them the digerati: a motley group of mouse-happy Indians from different walks of life who spend all their leisure hours (and some of their work hours too) leaving footprints all over cyberspace. They speak a different language, their social life is non-existent, their families find them strange and distant, their real-time friends have given up on them. Yet there is no stronger attraction for them than shutting the real world with a slam of their door, clicking onto the dial-up mode and cruising that intangible ether between one computer and another. One could be a painter in Baroda who's into digital art and feels the canvas doesn't excite anymore. Or a remix musician in Pune who finds nothing more stimulating than "jamming on-line" with an anonymous brother musician playing an instrument he hasn't heard in Helsinki. Or a shy accountant in Thiruvananthapuram who suddenly realises that persons like him with covert foot fetishes have a coherent culture on the Net, complete with support groups, chat rooms and a national network. What is the attraction that makes them stay incessantly on-line? It's an amalgamation of many things -- making friends, grappling with technology, amplifying your ideas and moving towards a futuristic global society. "For me," says Simarprit Singh, a businessman in Delhi who spends seven to eight hours a day on the Net, "the excitement lies in finding that whatever interest/kink that I conjure up, there seem to be others out there who are just as interested." Indeed, many see the Internet as this huge imaginary machine that is sorting out the human race into little sub-groups of mutual interests. Choose a subject -- something as weird as circumcision problems of newborns -- and sure enough you'll find a whole cyber community dedicated to it. Travel to the extremities of the Web and you'll find dozens of sites devoted to subjects ranging from cigar fetishes or the common cold to a community that wants to unite India and Pakistan (their punch line: just imagine the combined cricket team!). Dental pain? Snot? Stomping on ants? You guessed it: just another integrated circuit on the Web. Each of these tribes comprise a virtual world in themselves. Where gods and demi-gods keep order, invent rules and help tenderfoots get their feet wet. Locals stroll down virtual boulevards speaking a peculiar home-grown lingo; couples fall in love enacting mating rituals as old as the species and as new as the next Java upgrade. And elders reminisce about the good old days, grousing how the place has gone downhill ever since the moronic throngs arrived. Ask Shyamsunder Aggarwal, 61, a Mumbai businessman who believes that people like him are a new class of citizens. "The Net brings a sense of empowerment because people there get truly involved with issues." Many like Aggarwal feel the Net has been portrayed as ground zero for weirdos. It's as true as saying the real world is full of weirdos. "There will always be weirdos," says Aggarwal, "but there is also social responsibility and community participation." The reason for that, many say, is because cyberspace is very conducive to frankness. Shorn of their real bodies, the desire to know the other person's minds becomes overwhelmingly urgent. "You find yourself speaking with dead honesty." Besides, the medium invites you to contribute in any website or discussion group. It isn't like the government is rushing to listen to you, but the fact is that as the Net grows and if your ideas are valid, people will amplify them and they will be heard. "I find I'm a better global citizen today," says Aggarwal.
And a global citizen needs a cyber lifestyle. "The Net," says Aslam Shems who runs an advertising agency in Delhi, "I believe was made for me." He's part of a group of hardcore surfers who log on at a dedicated site each night and chat for hours and hours. "We're all techies with similar interests ... it's like a cult -- we look after each other." Most of his friends are in their 30s and prefer cruising the circuits to settling down and getting married. It wasn't always like that. Back in 1996 -- New Year's eve to be precise, Shems had a wild idea of throwing a party where his virtual friends scattered across the globe (through video conferencing) could meet his real-time friends. It was a blast -- one of his virtual women pals even stripped for his real-time friends. Today, his real-time friends have dwindled. Those who survive are anyway mirror images of him -- cyberjunkies to the hilt. Recently, Shems spent a mini-fortune in his Greater Kailash pad setting up four upper-end machines, six phone lines, six air conditioners and a 10 kv genset so that he and his friends could surf together. Why the generator? "Recurring power failures were driving me mad ... take a normal man and deny him access to his family. That's how I was feeling." But spare a thought for the families of these cyberadoes -- how do they feel? Most of them visualise the Net as a demon that traps you in your room, letting you out years later, pale, sweating, hairless, with atrophied legs and speaking a strange language. Ask Jatin Thakkar, 30, a chemical engineer in Mumbai. His wife Monica openly complains: "I hate his computer ... he spends all his nights with it." Others complain how, even if they are dragged to parties, they stay silent and detached until they chance upon another Net geek. Says Sonu Munshi, 21, a Netizen who works with an advertising firm: "It's like you've imbibed a new culture, and your family or friends are in culture shock." Look, for instance, at the language: it's purely ungrammatical, badly structured with code words like VoodooII card, a 12MB Video Ram and T1,T2,T3 lines and acronyms like LOL (laughing out loud) and RTFM (read the expletive manual). HEY!!!1, reads an all too typical message on the Web, I THINK KAJOL IZ REEL KOOL DOOD!1!!!.
But what's nonsense to most is sheer poetry to the digerati. Admits Sahani: "On-line language can be awful. But fact is, it isn't like ordinary language." The knack is to look at on-line writing as "written speech". Most of it is composed fast and furious against the clock because being on-line costs money and one usually wants to pack in as much as possible. On-line writing isn't there to have and hold; it's there to fire and forget. Sahani, shy by nature, points out that at first he felt afraid of typing something lest he be criticised, laughed at or, worse, ignored. "But once you get into the momentum, you get going deeper, get loose." Of course, there is a flip-side. Cyberspace is also an arena where escapism thrives. People who live humdrum existences staring at tiny screens in tiny cubicles, suddenly realise they can lead virtual, superhuman lives. They can fly a $400 million fighter aircraft, fight monsters in a 40-level 3D world, stretch their sexuality to the outer limits and live forever for glory. Take Jason Fernandes, for instance. A 15-year-old who has dropped out of school and lives in a twitchy hybrid world of pop obsession like aliens and the paranormal. An IQ test indicated that Fernandes is a gifted child and though his mother has put him in the National Open School, he learns through his PC. "I secretly believe that I will become the next Bill Gates," he says. But in the end it all boils down to the individual. Ricky Kapoor, 31, is still heavily into gaming through the Net's servers with other players round the world. He also belongs to a cult that idolises a computer-game superheroine called Lara Croft -- a 5 ft 4 inches pistol-packing woman who wears an athletic bra. But he isn't cuckoo. "It's just that I differentiate between the virtual and the real," he says, adding, "The way I do it. Just keep taking frequent reality checks even if you don't want to put in some real-life experiences." |
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