For our crowd, I always have wondered that, the internet is such a blessing. It brings us together breaking the barriers of location, timezone, race & everything. I wish religion played the role of the internet in bringing together people & collectively help us achieve better with our collective potential.
Anyway, day dreaming is no good! Religion will remain a divisive force & internet, an unifying force.
I am imagining how life would have been without it. When I was growing up & came to understand my sexuality, the internet was parallelly evolving too. In the early 2000s, during my teens, when I realised my fondness for men with chest hair & my natural obsession with the scruffy, I could search on 'Outpersonals' or 'Guys4Men' or chat on the classis Yahoo chats, Room number 9, to discover similar people with similar preferences. I don't remember meeting anyone through the internet at that stage, nevertheless I did have my own fair share of sexual experiences with some people I knew already or I knew later after the sexual encounter.
But, imagine, even in a country like India, which is supposed to be an IT country, there are 10000s of villages that are still yet to get the power of the internet. There are so many boys & men like me from the early 2000s who are discovering their sexuality & coming to terms with it but are too afraid to talk to anyone about it. How would they express themselves? How would they meet people at all but for online dating & things like that?
It seriously makes me wonder. If you think I am sort of over imagining this, login to Planetromeo & see the number of users online in small cities like a Vizag or a Tirunelveli or Salem. Even in big cities, when we have a choice between the 300-500 odd users online, barely 2-3 are we able to strike a meaningful conversation with. Logistics, priorities etc. are enough reasons to screw up the meeting. When your choices are less than 10, imagine what the scene is!
I don't mean to sympathise with anyone because I am a strong believer of 'they'll figure it out themselves'. I do, all the time. Many do, all the frigging time. One in need, real need, will figure it out himself. Yet, it makes me wonder how. Sometimes, I even wonder if things were better that way. The uncertainty of the interest level of the person in front of you. He could be a neighbour or a cousin or some random guy at a temple festival or a wedding or a nearby storekeeper or anyone at all. That smile that gives away, the thrill that you get, the minute of self-doubt where you imagine the worst things happening with this guy, the impulse which you succumb to, the rush for grabbing something within 2 minutes of meeting someone(In the PR world, it just NEVER happens!), the instinct to run along with the person to find a dark corner for just the two of you, the moment when you are in the middle of the act and somebody barges in & you run for your life to save your ass!
After all, writing is a way to keep things that you imagine in a parallel universe. How I wish these things happened & these would rather be memoirs than lines of fiction!
Anyway, day dreaming is no good! Religion will remain a divisive force & internet, an unifying force.
I am imagining how life would have been without it. When I was growing up & came to understand my sexuality, the internet was parallelly evolving too. In the early 2000s, during my teens, when I realised my fondness for men with chest hair & my natural obsession with the scruffy, I could search on 'Outpersonals' or 'Guys4Men' or chat on the classis Yahoo chats, Room number 9, to discover similar people with similar preferences. I don't remember meeting anyone through the internet at that stage, nevertheless I did have my own fair share of sexual experiences with some people I knew already or I knew later after the sexual encounter.
But, imagine, even in a country like India, which is supposed to be an IT country, there are 10000s of villages that are still yet to get the power of the internet. There are so many boys & men like me from the early 2000s who are discovering their sexuality & coming to terms with it but are too afraid to talk to anyone about it. How would they express themselves? How would they meet people at all but for online dating & things like that?
It seriously makes me wonder. If you think I am sort of over imagining this, login to Planetromeo & see the number of users online in small cities like a Vizag or a Tirunelveli or Salem. Even in big cities, when we have a choice between the 300-500 odd users online, barely 2-3 are we able to strike a meaningful conversation with. Logistics, priorities etc. are enough reasons to screw up the meeting. When your choices are less than 10, imagine what the scene is!
I don't mean to sympathise with anyone because I am a strong believer of 'they'll figure it out themselves'. I do, all the time. Many do, all the frigging time. One in need, real need, will figure it out himself. Yet, it makes me wonder how. Sometimes, I even wonder if things were better that way. The uncertainty of the interest level of the person in front of you. He could be a neighbour or a cousin or some random guy at a temple festival or a wedding or a nearby storekeeper or anyone at all. That smile that gives away, the thrill that you get, the minute of self-doubt where you imagine the worst things happening with this guy, the impulse which you succumb to, the rush for grabbing something within 2 minutes of meeting someone(In the PR world, it just NEVER happens!), the instinct to run along with the person to find a dark corner for just the two of you, the moment when you are in the middle of the act and somebody barges in & you run for your life to save your ass!
After all, writing is a way to keep things that you imagine in a parallel universe. How I wish these things happened & these would rather be memoirs than lines of fiction!
Muust say you write welll... one of the more interesting blogs i have come across .. amazing insight and so true ....
ReplyDelete