Forgive me Facebook, for I've sinned (and seen others sinning)

#I Made out with my ex gf on the 4th floor off our quincentary building and was caught by one of our peons.... Took 1200 bucks for not complaining ... Fu..errr (Loyola Hall)
#Was proposed by two girls who rejected me during engineering; don’t feel guilty when I am two timing with them now. (IIM-Ahmedabad)

#I still remember that moment perfectly. We had gone to R world Gandhinagar after bunking school. We caught one of our school teacher along with a lady.. As we neared them we were shocked to find out that it was one of our maams.. We clicked a photo of them which still remains on my laptop. Even today the teacher doesn’t have the guts to have an eye contact with me. :P (St Xavier’s high school, Loyola Hall)

Encouraged by the anonymity that the internet provides, the young and the old in the city are unburdening themselves of long-held secrets through confessions. But these confessions aren’t being made in cramped confessionals in churches but in that cathedral of social networking – Facebook. The confessions pages of several schools and colleges on Facebook are replete with tales of love and transgression posted by students past and present.

Unlike the Catholic confession, there isn’t a priest on hand to forgive and guide ‘sinners’ to the right path. There is just an administrator who ensures that professions of love or lust do not end up ruining someone’s reputation. The confessions, most of them anonymous, range from the hilarious to the malicious, from the silly to the outrageous, spilling details from the lives of all and sundry.

“Confessing in private is passé. Doing it on a public forum is fun. You realise there are many who had the same failings as yourself,” said a teen. She equated online confessions with freedom of speech but insisted that she be quoted anonymously.

On how the trend started, the administrator of PDPU’s confessions page (who is also a current student of the university) said it began a few months ago after one of the IITs started a similar page.

Aware that mischievous elements could damage reputations through malicious allegations, the administrator of DPS School’s confessions page has taken it upon himself to remove names of people mentioned in ‘confessional’ posts.
“There are several confessions that are offensive to particular teachers or students. We filter such comments, either delete them or remove the names of people mentioned in the post. This is done to ensure that no individual teacher or student is targeted by someone seeking perverse pleasure,” said the administrator.

In the Catholic Church, the priest forgives the penitent in the name of God. On Facebook, however, confessions beget a chain of comments that are as uninhibited, bitchy, nasty or simply funny as the post itself. A considerable number of posts are dedicated to unravelling some mystery about the confessor himself or those mentioned in the post.

On the need for such pages, the administrator of Loyola Ahmedabad confessions page said: “Loyola is a place where students always have their secrets but are afraid of sharing them perhaps for fear of ridicule or retribution. But on such forums as the confessions pages, the identity of a person is not revealed. I personally feel this is a good way of revealing all the stupid things we did at school,” the administrator said.

City-based educational institutions which have a confessions page include IIT-Gandhinagar, IIMA, NIFT, PDPU, Nirma University and schools like Loyola, DPS and Mount Carmel among others.

Psychologists and priests, however, do not see the Facebook confessions as a genuine attempt to admit a mistake. Bishop Thomas Macwan of the Catholic Church said that a confession is something sacred.

“A person speaks of his or her sins and the priest forgives the sinner in the name of God. Confessions can’t take place over telephone or Facebook. It should be avoided,” the Bishop said.

City-based psychologist Pratima Bhattacharjee, who has worked with children and adults for the last 40 years, sees it as a sign of the times.

“These days we have poor role models. There is constant bickering at home and hence the virtual world seems the best place to vent your frustrations. In our society, freedom of expression often gets suppressed. The anonymity provided by the virtual world is a guarantee that no one will be caught,” said Bhattacharjee.

She believes that such posts are not always about confessions. “They are undisciplined, uncontrolled and impulsive expressions of feeling. They are less a confession than anonymous bullying and harassing of others,” she said.