Your friend does not exist!

Sending scraps, writing testimonials, sharing pictures and videos and above all commenting on various common interest topics in the community are the actions that personify your friendship on the net. This is a newer version of the pen friend, isn’t it?

Vickie kept in touch with old friends while at the same time made new contacts too. Her friend list was growing day by day and so was her addiction to social networking sites. Although that never stopped her from going out, meeting and spending time in person with other friends, she also wasn’t that keen to share her life with them as she did with her friend on the net. She sort of depended on that particular friend in the cyber space whom she had never met or seen in person a lot to ventilate her feelings about the real world in which she lived. Whatever problem she shared with him on the net seemed to vanish the very next day. Be it her worries about her assignments, less allowance, tiff with another friend or even her desires would come true. One fine day her computer gave away leaving her feeling handicap. The cyber café was far from home and hence not a good option. The only option was the PC in her parents’ room. Since her dad was away for a business trip he had taken his laptop along and her mother was busy in the kitchen. She made her way to her dad’s PC in her parent’s room to meet this virtual friend of hers. She switched it on and was waiting for her friend to come online when she decided to browse through the old family pictures stored on that computer. What she found was the pictures of her trip with her friends that she had sent only to this virtual friend and nobody else. Quite surprised to not only find this but many such other pictures that she had recently sent to her friend, she stormed out to her mother to question her since both her parents used this PC. Her mother took her into the living room and said, “Your friend does not exist.”

Her parents were a bit worried over her attitude towards them. They would wait to talk about her endless internet chatting over dinner only to find that she started taking her dinner in her room itself. If internet chatting was about communicating and overcoming distances, well, she wasn’t communicating with her parents anymore and was getting far from them each moment. Hence they decided to communicate with her in her own way. They made a false profile on the social networking site and made friends with her. Whenever they came to know about anything that disturbed her they would solve it immediately.

So it wasn’t this virtual friend that helped her throughout but her own parents. She of course had distanced herself from them but as parents usually are- “always caring” found another way to help her.

Friends, never let this happen to you. Always value the real people around you and use the net but to an extent. It’s just a tool at the end of the day!

Toon time fun

Saving the planet, saving the day, solving mysteries, troubling genius brothers, exploring deep oceans and the jungle, soaring the skies delivering packages, and dealing with the masters of the universe were some of the things that I have enjoyed growing up with. These cartoons had simple themes and loads of fun and entertainment. No challenges, no competitions, no transforming things or selves into wild beings and yes, no killing and abusing others. Cartoon channels have either taken on to educating children or inciting competition amongst them. Its not that competition is not good but too much of everything is bad. The new definition for fun seems to beat each other in collecting merchandises, winning competitions or simply knowing the names of all the characters that a super-natural creature can transform into after coming out of a ball. A two year old calls his mother by her name and makes passes on women. Another rides on a dragon and even transforms into one. He can also control aliens with his power. These battle driven shows do not have a comic element to it. They cannot offer the fun that a simple cat and mouse chase never fails to. May be the definition of fun has changed or has been changed by our marketing professionals. Their theory of influencing the child thereby influencing the parents and hence adding on to their sales has had an adverse effect on the innocent fun that a child derived by simply watching cartoons!