One good thing about Facebook is that it brought back into my life friends that I had lost touch with many moons ago.
After the initial shock of gleefully seeing how the times have been unkind, or kind to us, it was nice to communicate with many old friends, many of whom I did not recognise. (I am sure, they too must have looked at my photograph of my decrepit self and tut-tutted about how people cannot take care of themselves and how low maintenance makes one paunchy and slovenly).
The closest analogy of what Facebook does to you when you find your old friends online, is like our wedding photograph the wife insists on displaying in our living room. Visitors walk about and peer at the photograph, do a double take, and look at us across the room and are forced to say something.
“Nice looking cat,” they say, pointing to the photograph of the marble-white cat that we had brought with us from Dubai that had got stolen, but say absolutely nothing about us in the wedding picture or comment on the weather-beaten looking couple that are now sitting in the present in the living room.
“Oooo, you had a moustache ... and you had hair on your head. you look good,” said one newly-found friend, looking at me in my wedding sherwani (a long coat with a closed collar that looks really cool on slim guys) in the photograph, but luckily stopped herself from saying, “God, what happened to you?” (Psychologists say it is always better to say a positive thing to people about their looks or their work than anything negative).
Yes, I had a moustache that was more like an American Wild West outlaw’s, more Sundance Kid in the Hollywood movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, than the infamous tinpot dictator Saddam Hussain of Iraq, but I had landed in the Arab Gulf states at an exciting time.
Making friends
Incidentally, that sherwani had to be given to a charity as I would never fit into it again, despite fasting the whole of Ramadan, without missing any days.
Incidentally, making friends becomes tough after a certain age if you are freelancing from the safety of your home and have practically nobody to talk to for days on end. “We should go to the Bengaluru press club and chat,” I asked a contact that my friend back in Dubai had given me, in my initial ‘enthu’ (enthusiasm) after landing in Bengaluru and raring to make new friends.
“The press club is a sorry place, nobody goes there,” said the contact and that was that. I was back again going to Cubbon Park with my wife and talking to the squirrels and the sleepy dogs.
Then I found my virtual friends suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and would drown me in Whatsapp messages that included everything from sad jokes, racist sayings, photographs of cats and old women swinging on well, garden swings, and enjoying it.
Then I heard that the founder of Facebook, a guy who only wears sweatshirts as that requires less stress over deciding what to wear every morning, was selling data of all the Facebookers or whatever they are called, to companies so that they can bombard them with subliminal advertising and make them buy stuff and services they don’t really need.
When I informed my friends, one said she didn’t really care whether Zuckerberg sold her data or not.
I however, went ahead and deleted Facebook and started ignoring WhatsApp messages.
I now feel so lonely but do feel jealous of my friends, who all seem to be having a good time.
Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. Twitter: @mahmood_saberi.
