Internet, the name is enough!

Internet. What's the first thought that comes to your mind? Email, Facebook, Entertainment, Timepass, Waste!?!?!

For me I become curious or my body become more of a positive jittery. Am born in 81 so internet came to my life very late. That time was around 1999 when this whole revolution was starting. There was no google or wikipedia and what I remember was using Exite.com, Aol, Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo. There was no major search engines except for something like Genie, Razor Search. Neither there was any social networking website. Alumni.net, Batchmates.com were some where we added and registered ourselves so that our lost friends can find us.

No wonder internet is addictive and this starts with Yahoo Messenger and it's various Group services. Now since India was experiencing Internet that period so very less people were aware of what else we can do over the internet. Yahoo provided a one stop shop for all users from email, chatting, news, movie reviews etc. Gradually hotmail also threw in good services with Security as their motto.

For small towns, Cyber Cafes stretched their arms and started tapping kids and teens. Small town Cafes used to charge Rs 50 and above per hour without any backup which means all were dependent upon electricity and yeah a dial up modem. When someone connected the modem it had a very detoriating buzz sound and as the buzz changes the internet gets connected. BSNL was the main player followed by Satyam Online which ofcourse changed into Sify.

In bigger cities, Cyber Cafes adthered to their name and introduced foodies, drinks and living upto the Cafe name. In Delhi some cafes introduced discount cards for regular customers and also gifted them. Money poured in for these small and big city cafes.

Though education wise or knowledge wise I feel internet was least effective as compared to what it is now. Email was the only communicative use the internet served as apart from surfing, reading news or chatting.

For me internet though was a timepass for me initially but I wanted to make use of it by doing something creative. I lived in a boy's PG in South Ex-II and apart from studies any other source of entertainment were not very entertaining. So I decided to make a website. Yes, I had done a one year Aptech course after my 12th and knew a bit of html. Now without having any idea of domains or hosting I searched the web and came across Yahoo Geocities. This web application was a messiah in disguise. They have easy tools to make free website and the user id serves as a unique name after their domain name. So mine was www.geocities.com/partha_scorpion. Weird name right. So I prepared my website without any guidelines and there were pages like

• Homepage : From where a user can navigate to other pages.
• Picture Gallery : Pictures of my friends, and family.
• News Page : Redirected from Yahoo News.
• Download Page : Downloads of applications like mIRC, Toolbars, Desktop backgrounds.
• Comments Section : Where users could come and comment their experience.

Today Geocities have no existence as Yahoo closed it down few years back. The bits of my broken page can be found in http://www.geocities.ws/partha_scorpion/index-2.html 

Tremendous change came later when people transformed their BSNL lines to internet lines and how BSNL marketed their plans in the local dailies. It was more of a push medium where people were skeptical about the whole use of internet in their daily lives and giants like BSNL advertised in newspapers. Now Indians  always have this never fading special feeling for BSNL, MTNL, TATA, Electricity Board etc. Now when they advertised something, even if it's a piece of rock.. people would storm in their offices to buy one and here internet connection was no different. I remember when TATA Indica was introduced in 1998 people in small towns had gone crazy. They visualized that future taxi as Indian BMW! Pre-Bookings, Diwali & Puja offers and what freaking not. All I saw few months later that Indica sounded like a tractor and people regretting their buy. Same happened for BSNL as well.

BSNL had and still have a very very poor after sales service. Means.. after you purchase any service from BSNL you are trapped. If that thing dont work BSNL guys won't even come to your home to rectify. Places where there were frequent thunder storms and rains or places were there were frequent wire cuts due to storms were worst effected. Your phone lines dead and so is your internet. They provide outdated modems that time Dial Ups and not ADSL .. or whatever. There can be millions of reasons why a BSNL internet is down and without any proper rectification.

Gradually many computer hardware companies tied up with some ISP (Internet Service Providers) so when anyone buys a PC they get internet connection free for a year. Amazing right! Thankfully my folks back home were not that technologically conscious and they never foresighted the need of a PC at our home.

Today when I see the transformation I feel amazing. Today I got a 2MBps Airtel connection at home, a 3G Vodafone network for my smartphone, a 3MBps TATA Photon Data Card and yes again an dual Airtel 2MBps leased line at my office. I pay my internet, phone bills online. I recharge my mom's TATA Sky and also book movie tickets, buy books and clothes.. all online. Wikipedia & Google became a major source of knowledge while Gmail became a one stop solution for emails, calenders, tasks etc. No wonder what Facebook means to the world today.

I'd also like to mention those website transformation like Indiatimes.com popped up one day and like Yahoo also showcased a huge load of services, but for Indians. So did rediff transformed and also introduced a messenger service called Rediff Bol with a red parrot. I could never run that application without shutting it down from the task menu (Ctrl+Alt+Del). I just hate Rediff Bol. Sify too came with amazing services not only online but also they opened up membership cafes arcoss India with economy rates and good speed.

I took my first PC in 2004 which was gifted by Mom at Delhi. My younger brother & me without any guidance land up in Nehru Place to buy a PC. If I think of that situation I don't believe myself today. So we buy a branded PC named Xenitis by some Kolkatta based IT firm. Now, in Munirka, where I was staying at that time, the only ISP available was Sify. The starting plan was 64KBps and with a download speed of 8kbps so ideally that speed was of no use to download. All we did was surf the internet. Later we migrated our plan to 128KBps as 256KBps (Broadband) was too expensive that time. I still remember running my PC overnights just to download a song, movie, game etc.

This technology transformation of Internet smells so good and I wonder .. what's next? 

Being Assamese

We assamese are said to be the most peace loving people in the society. We don't resort to violence or crimes and would live happily with a handful of whatever we have. Though this can just be one side of the coin. The other side is the judgmental attitude. Yes, they have this tendency to judge their fellow peers, friends, strangers etc. As for most of them I may not be an Assamese. Though I understand and speak my mother tongue fluently. So why am I being judged just because I don't write or read the language. This amuses me every time I see someone posting in Facebook about how "Hardcore" Assamese one can be? But if I see the facts, Assamese population in Assam in very low in comparison to the non Assamese crowd residing in Assam, be it Marwari, Bihari, Jharkhandi, Bengali or Bangladeshi. 

Carmel School & Kendriya Vidyalaya set my education base. Brought up between friends who were non Assamese. I speak Assamese at home and no I don't abuse around streets like am selling Bananas! Moreover, I am proud to speak Hindi as any North Indian and no one can make out with my accent that am actually from Assam. 

I know the alphabets and even can read the local newspaper though not affluently. Being treated like an outsider or non existent is suffocating. But here's the irony, if we check on the statistics, more of today's Assamese youth reside outside Assam and learn other languages like Kannada, Tamil, Haryanvi just to blend themselves in! That can either be for studies, work or even getting married. 

I've friends who are from Kerala and dunno how to read or write Malyalam and they are cool with it. Their folks are cool with it and so is their society. When does one lose his/her identity? I believe it's then when I being an Assamese portray myself as a Non Assamese and pretend to be someone different. I hope they get the point!

Reading or Writing a language and speaking the same fluently cannot be a reason to being a Hardcore Assamese. It's one's personal choice which can also arise from situation. Even though I don't know how to read or write my native language I'm an Assamese by heart and no one can change that. I don't need to keep long hair or a goatee or a tattoo or do joints. Judging me just for that sick reason only makes me judge them being sick and loser. They fail to understand that when Assamese youth go outside Assam they also bring Assam outside to those states which can be the culture, the music, the ethnicity and not to forget, the food.

I think we Assamese ought to keep a big heart to their own people as much as they show to outsiders. As someone said, home is where the heart is!

Chatter Box

My acquaintance with chatting started in early 2000 in Delhi as internet addiction was starting to take pace in the minds of the young boys coming from small town to big cities like Delhi or any other metros.  My ex room mate was a frequent chatter then and I too eventually got the bug myself.


Earlier in my Delhi University days, college time was just 4-5 hours then I had nothing else to do. Delhi was the new found freedom and I tend to exploit myself in eating.. but how much can anyone eat so much as things were starting to get boring. Same South Ex (where I used to live), same Bengali Sweets. 


My ex room mate used to visit this ulta modern cyber cafe in front of Bengali Sweets named Hub. It used to have a huge infrastructure and offered membership cards. Also if the members were frequent, they also gift those members.. as for me I got a wrist watch. Imagine.. I got a gift from a cyber cafe for being so frequent. So, back to my story, I gradually increased my frequency of visiting to cyber cafe as I was bored sleeping, eating out and movies watching was not a frequent time pass to me.


Once while I was there checking out my Hotmail account, I saw my ex room mate chatting at mIRC. Now mIRC is a chatting application which connects to you the various chatting servers. These servers were home to many other similar chatters who used to create chat rooms and also there were network administrators, admins etc to manage the users as well as the server. My roomie used to chat in the DALnet servers.DALnet server was a hub to many assamese chatters and served as a virtual home outside real home.The mIRC interface was not a interactive and crisp as Yahoo Chat rooms. mIRC was more like a command based DOS type environment. I forgot to mention, at that time I used to chat with my friends in Yahoo Chat and the newly launched Rediff Chat. Rediff Chat was very dull and used to hang so I moved to Yahoo chat.


Now we assamese have a peculiar tendency. When we're outside home we tend to believe that no one else is more assamese than I am. This results in looking down on fellow assamese and also ego clashes. Now when I came to know that mIRC is a hub of assamese people I took interest in that platform. But creating Id was not that easy. There's a Nick Server who manages the Nick Names and Channel Server which manages the Channels or rooms. So once I joined the DALnet server, after being guided by my ex room mate) I got hooked to it. I was soon a part of the hub which connects to assamese globally. In mIRC rooms were mentioned to as channels and has a hash tag in front of the name. So #Assam was a channel were we would flock into. 


Now in mIRC, a channel is managed by 3 level administrators: Level 1 is the Founder, Level 2 the Super Operators and Level 3 the Auto Operators. The operators used to have a @ sign in front of their nicks. So the Founder can assign Sop & Aop and Sop can assign Aop. The more someone is frequent the more are the chances to getting a operator status. The deal sounds not so enticing at first but the powers of operators make it more tempting. Operators can kick, ban (permanent or temporary) and in other words, rule the whole channel. #Assam too was under such wrath. Why I say wrath, there's a reason. Chatters are not always well behaved or descent. They fight frequently, misbehave, swear to each other and the operators (who acts as a policeman) tend to kick, ban them. If a user is good with an operator, then he might play politics in the channel and keep his enemies out. Now this was power play and tempting to the other chatters.


To come to the basics, chatters are basically lonely fellows. They chat to come over their loneliness while making friends virtually and who won't judge them through their physical appearance or verbal communication. Here all once does is type. These chatters make chatting as their habit and eventually they ruin their social lives by letting the virtual environment rule their lives. A common problem with a chatter is "Mood Swings". If he has a bad day in chatting this might reflect in his real life as well. Since one cannot see the other chatter so it's nearly impossible to judge the mood of that other chatter. It's just that the smilies denote their moods ex. :-) means happy and :-( means sad. Now many a times if someone writes something in such a way that the other fellow chatter misunderstands to be rude, then automatically the fellow chatter too feels a bad mood situation. They fight for power, girls etc. Yes even girls and they would date the girls in private chat rooms.


So coming back to my story, as I got hooked up in mid 2000 to chatting and by 2001 mid I started to spend around 6 hours daily. I shifted to South Ex part II and there too I had made a monthly account. But side by side I was also leaning html codes online and made my first profile page of around 8 to 10 pages and hosted on the free Yahoo web hosting services called Geocities then. 


Chatting did affected my life socially, financially and mentally. I guess in 2005 I promised myself to end the curse and come back to a serious life. I recommendation, the best cure is format your PC and call up your old friends and meet them. Or better, take up hobbies like reading etc. Chatting is just a habit and it can be cured.