Orkut-ting!

Warning: The following blog is sprayed with a lot of Orkut jargon. If you don't know about it, you soon will!

Ok... How many of you have never heard of Orkut or are not members of it??? If you haven't heard of it or are not a part of it, I suggest you skip this blog and keep your beautifully unpolluted brain the way its meant to be... Coz If you read further, you might be tempted to join and once you're in, its going to take very long to get it out of your system. Its a complete waste of time and unless you are completely lukha, you will probably not have time for it and will be sneaking in every break you have to see who 'scrapped' you.

Well for the honorary members of Orkut, 'scrapping' is but, a way of life... When people meet one another in the hallways of school, they call out saying, "Hey there... I scrapped you today" because stating what they 'scrapped' would ofcourse make no sense and would be a crime against society. Indeed I was soo into this whole thing that I got pissed with a friend when he deleted a 'scrap' he'd written in my scrapbook in front of me. And he bought out a valid point. We met everyday and spent all the time we could together and yet that scrap was soo important to me because it bought down the number of my 1000 odd scraps by 1! Crazy!

To talk about the pros of the whole Orkut experience, well, I did find a lot of my schoolmates who to me were for all practical purposes nonexistent after school and I didn't have an inkling of what they were upto... And it was good to get back in touch with them and scrap them once in a while for an update. Its a pretty neat thing once you know how to restrict the unknown people from entering your 'Friends List' n all... There are 'communities' which you can join which helps other people identify your interests and the ones with common interests tend to come close (personally, I haven't become close to anyone in any community that I have joined.. And that's saying something considering I have 50+ communities). And for people with the concept that time is knuts (read Harry Potter) Orkut is the one boon that they have wanted. One finds himself endlessly scourging the site for goodlooking women most of the time and otherwise just looking mindlessly at the photo albums of everyone on his list. Its another of those things which you can do forever and then wonder what the hell happened in the past umpteen hours!

To talk about the cons, well, I am sure that the Orkut people thought they were very smart in restricting the joining to 'By Invitation Only'. Little did they know that the world was an intricate matrix, all innately linked somewhere and all it needed was a center stem to sprout and grow. On the last count, Orkut had a whopping 14,231,910 members!!!! That's more than the population of entire London!! Forget the factor that you can join by invitation only. You can practically bet that about a 100 people you know are members out there and everyone wants an extra friend in his list and if he hasn't sent you an invite already, all you need to do is mention it! So, you join... And you put up a display picture. Well, if you are unfortunate enough to put a pretty picture, you are deluged by friend requests... some genuine and some definitely from creepy people... Having had a bad experience through a similar process, I can tell you its not a good idea to 'add' anyone no matter how nice they seem unless you can relate to them somewhere, somehow through someone! I guess I'm one of those people who seemingly frown upon an internet romance. And indeed I do! How can you know you 'love' someone without ever seeing them for what they are?!?!?!?

And then ofcourse is the (in)famous Orkut donut! Just when you wanted to see what testimonial that hot guy wrote you, Orkut flashes that famously cute message about how Orkut ain't gonna get any donut. Like you care! You want your testimonial! And Orkut tends to frustrate people a bit with its immensely slow processing. I must mention that out here in the US its phenomenally faster than when I was back in India... but hey, its picking up out there too!

At the end of the day, I must say as long as you control orkut and not the other way around, you're good. You can use it constructively to get to know people of similar interest, to get back in touch with old buddies and drop a line with the ones you haven't seen in a while (much better than adding them on messenger - unless you talk to them a lot or taking the pains to remember email IDs), etc.

When do you know you're hooked and you HAVE to get it out of your system?

1. You take pictures exclusively to make more interesting 'display images'
2. You yell "hey I scrapped and you haven't replied" to a friend when you meet instead of the normal - "hey, whassup" routine...
3. "Did you change your hairstyle?" -- when your only frame of reference is the display image you saw!
4. "I can't believe he has 15 more friends than I do!" - Hell-lo.. Grow up... Its on Orkut - not for real- as if you could count that anyways!

If you see symptoms like those above, dude, you are done for and better out than in... Get out of it and get on with LIFE!