Rest In Peace: “Hi! A/s/l pls”

When was the last time someone asked for your a/s/l (age, sex, location)? I can’t remember. Seriously. Can you?

Come to think of it, finding a perfect stranger on the internet is next to impossible these days.

I was in my final year of school when the information superhighway became the internet. Only a few boys in my class (I went to an all boys Catholic school) had a net connection. Since the connection was very expensive (Rs15,000 for 500 hours) most of them had emotionally blackmailed their bureaucrat fathers to reveal their office internet connection passwords.

Only a lucky few got the chance. The rest of us heard stories. Internet was freedom. No boundaries. Get online and you’re someone else. You were what you typed.

Today our collective internet experience is quality controlled by the social network, which is essentially owned and managed by a corporation. But basically, I am told, one is among friends.

I watch videos shared by my peers and I read articles recommended by them. Quality control contains randomness and what can be more random and unpredictable than a stranger on the internet? Which is why perhaps Facebook discourages its users from adding people on their friend list whom they don’t personally know.

With less freedom and more fear of the unknown, I wonder if this is the internet dream we were sold as children.

Back then, while one could still read the New York Times or the Princeton University philosophy archive online, one felt no need to share it with friends. If one was bored (teenagers are always bored), one could just get to one of the chat rooms, hang on a few minutes to get the drift and jump into the conversation. On a good day, in about ten minutes or so, one could find a couple of people to PM (private message). 

Those were the days. Terrorists didn’t know how to chat and perverts looking for children went to Third World countries instead of a chat room.

Life was random. One night, about ten years ago, I met Peggy, a 20-year-old single mother who lived in Mississippi. We’d talk almost every other day till one of us got bored or tired or sleepy. Peggy had a two-year-old son, Skylark, from her high-school boyfriend. One day I asked Peggy if she would have cyber sex with me. Sexual encounters were so common on the internet those days that even losers like me found someone. But Peggy was no ordinary girl. Let’s just say that she was a poet.

Sometimes I think of looking up Peggy on Facebook and wonder if the social network of today is better than the tube less internet we had back then.

Possibly my childhood internet dreams are obsolete now that we’re firmly anchored in our social network. It is a world we know and claim we trust. A world so perfect it has no need for an alibi or an alias.

Mayank Tewari is a struggling scriptwriter