To Be Or Not To Be ?

Welcome, Amit

You are connected to 59,238,695 people through 119 friends. This is what my Orkut home-page reads. Just looking at the numbers displayed anyone would trust that I am an ace person in making friendship. Well, its partially true. This figure simply suggests the number of people I am acquainted with in the virtual world. The world that we all live in today is fragmented in two equally surviving entities : Virtual & Real. With the advent of cyberspace, along came such virtuality in our lives that we put ourselves distinctively into two separate identities, the pros & cons is yet to be manifested. For an instance, in Orkut itself I have found myself communicating to people who live steps away from my home & with whom my real communication remained infinitesimally small. But in the virtual we have chatted like old buddies. Interestingly, I own a taciturn friend in real world, who likes to maintain silence but in the virtual world his volubility is quite evident from his blog. He writes so many words that he may not be speaking that much in a year. Why to leave the odd, even I have been known to speak as less as possible but the readers of my blog may not agree with me on this (those who don't know me in person). This change of our personality is certainly evident in many ways when we swing from one world to another. We become someone else in the virtual world. All the friendship that we possess in the cyberspace is nothing more than digital, keeping us all connected with each others through Graham Bell's invention : Telephone. Even Marquez's One hundred years of solitude, in which gypsies come with new scientific discoveries to a forbidden village claiming them all to be some sort of magic from the farthest corner of earth, will fall behind this magical cyberspace. Even Dolly the sheep has never been cloned in this way as we clone ourselves in form of various usernames & passwords. Definitely not, this virtual world is no different than real world. Here also exist all sorts of sins which defies the human limit of its reliance on technology. Hunter is being hunted ? Our reliance on modern technology has went to such an extereme that we cannot think to move an inch without it. Ironically, even this blogger needs it to write such comments. Few years back due to some technical problem in main frame computer the whole eastern coast of North America went into dark for several hours, leading the life to make a sudden fullstop. There were no rails, no traffic lights, created such a havoc that it took atleast two days for the system to get normal. Once watching discovery channel, I was duly informed by that electronic medium that US President possesses a red briefcase in which a computer is installed, having all the codes of US nuclear missiles. If some day the President wakes up with a heavy head, gone nuts, he can easily end the existence of humanity in just one click of button. God Bless US President. Digital love Just few months back one of my friend left Orkut for some very awkward reasons. Someone used his photos in an effort to win females in some adult community. Though I managed to catch the culprit, I was shocked, that person has been known to me from quite a few time & he always personified himself as another re-incarnation of Lord Vishnu, never missing a single daily visit to temple. I inquired him why did he did this. His answer was more shocking, Aise hi. Similarly, while surfing along TV channels a few days back, I got hold by the news on some news channel about how a girl is being molested by his unknown Orkut friend. She was under the impression that the boy loved her. This digital love of her made her fall into deep pain. No Ink, No Pen, No Paper One of the worst consequence of dwelling so much in to virtual world has been, according to me, the ill effect on words. The words have gone digital now, filling the never-filling gap of dissimilarity in writing of two different people. Now, we all write alike. The effect: actual hand writing getting worse. Even this blogger is suffering with the same illness. My writing is getting worse. Unlike Mahatma Gandhi, who remained very depressed for his entire life about his bad handwriting, it does not concerns me much but still just to mention it, its really getting worse. The books also have become digital, changing the long corridors of library into silicon chips, the inevitable conversion into e-books. Coming back, does our existence in these two worlds necessary ? Worse : Is it moral ? To be or not to be , thats the question.