Is the IPL on? Is the IPL off? Will it be in Rajasthan?
Is the IPL on? Is the IPL off? Will it be in Rajasthan? Or will it be in Gujarat? The questions and media minutes devoted to this expensive carnival of cricket came fast and furious. And the Great Indian Elections took a distant second seat even with Varun Gandhi's pathetic attempts at hitting the headlines.u00a0
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Poll or IPL? With the brouhaha over IPL, the Great Indian Elections took a distant second seat file pic |
But "Oh my god! Why has it changed?" "I simply can't find my way around" And "Why on earth did they go mess up my entire life!" were common pleas for help, heard last week.u00a0
And they had nothing to do with the elections, the IPL, the running around to pay income taxes and corporation taxes and service taxes, the many rapes and murders that shocked us over the last week, or even the Mutalik men, for once. This time, the voices of youth were joined together in one single common forum that went larger than geographical boundaries or communal lines.u00a0
Even stronger than the Association of Loose, Forward and Immoral Women, who collected innumerable pink innerwear to gift chaddi-less Mutalik, irate youth and not-so-youth from all over the world collected together in one common protest, the likes of which have never been seen before.u00a0
Estimates put the total figure at 1.8 million people who signed up to "Petition Against The New Facebook".
Online at least a zillion of my friends, at last count, all had their status messages about the new re-design or more accurately against it.u00a0
Sample some of these: Ranjith (name changed) is "disgusted that he has to plow through so many quizzes at a go." Swati is "angry that they've gone and disrupted her life" (sic!).
Vikram is "perfectly annoyed navigating his way around blind." And Zubin is "amazed that a redesign can unnerve him so much."
How can one site changing itself around a bit make so many people's Monday morning blues so much worse?
The familiar comfort of a morning cappuccino and a pre-work post weekend social run-over was derailed because of a new home page - the effect of which, tsunamied across varied time zones.u00a0u00a0
So what have we grown into? A world of facebook fans? Where a drab blue page and status updates and quiz results, rule our lives. This is a social phenomenon, archaeologists of the future will find hard to fathom.u00a0
Imagine finding a body, a million years from now, with an epitaph that reads: Here lies Aditya. Dearly beloved, he had seven hundred friends on Facebook, and was voted "The Most Lookalike to Spock" in a 2009 poll.u00a0
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Talking of RIP's, here's a personal tribute to Jade Goody who died a week ago. Another person who was spoken about and discussed and polled on Facebook.
