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Twit in check

I wrote this for The Times of India. The original story is here : http://bit.ly/aFTxH5

The chief minister of Maharashtra may soon declare a holiday for a new celebration, the ‘Washing Lenin Festival’. Befuddled? So were we. But blame it on Ritiesh Deshmukh. A few days ago, the actor tweeted, ‘’Most families don’t wash their Dirty Lenin in public’’. Don’t castigate Deshmukh. After all he does have political genes and they were sure to affect him some day.

If you are famous then your tweets have more followers. Only a skilled Piped Piper can lure the tweeple over a cliff and into a stormy sea. And celebrity Twitter followers are often at sea with their spello-studded tweets.

Virender Sehwag can be quite cryptic online. The cricketer regularly posts musings about life and love on the forum, but his followers were taken aback when he once posted: ‘’Living is very simple..loving is simple.. wining is also simple..laughing is too simple..but, being SIMPLE is very difficult!’’. Did he mean whining or wining as in ‘wining and dining’? It has to be one of these two connotations since the Indian cricketers excel at both these W words only. The verb winning, on the other hand, does not figure in their vocabulary. It is only mentioned sotto voce, so it cannot possibly figure in Sehwag’s tweet.

With Twitter going mainstream, every side heroine and spot boy seems to have a real-time page of their own. While some outsource this work to their PR army, others prefer connecting with their fans themselves. The celebrities that choose to update their own profiles without any interference from those boring image-correcting middlemen are every eavesdroppers’ delight. Every time that hidden flaw surfaces, fans feel more connected to their idol. They curse the media for sanitising grammatical errors and spellos that their idols make.

Today, Twitter is saturated with bigwigs scaling a vast range from the wannabes to the comebacks and the ones ruling the roost. Every time they take a false step, their followers are adventitiously amused.

Sameera Reddy who is learning how to ride a bike was so excited that her tweet was full of vigour. “Its invigourating! What an amazing sense of freedom on the road!Graduated to a pulsur 2day!’’. After landing at the international airport in Mumbai, and in a vulnerable state of mind she posted, “Landed at intl airport-can’t change ppls opinion of Mumbai-Overheard some foriegners say it’s smelly & dirty! It’s home & I’m glad to be bck!’’.

Another entertainer who doesn’t cease to amuse is Chunkay Punday, sorry, Chunkey Pandey. His last gem read, ‘’Started d match, we’r feilding. actually i am also handling commentry along with the feilding ’’.

Yuvraj Singh had people guessing with his arcane words when he tweeted, ‘’Can’t sleep too excited to go to windies ! Goin to the gym chocalate for breakfast yummyy! Oh by the way goodmornin everyone rise and shine!’’.

The verified and very official account of Shilpa Shetty, a dance addict, wished her ‘tweetos’ a “Happy Independance Day’’.

Her contemporary Ayesha Takia has diets on her mind and it shows in her tweets. She once tweeted, “My spot boy immidietly said ,madam neeche raste pe dus rupey ka do milega,400 rupey mein party!! Hahahahaahahhaahha!! How much v hav laughd’’. Also wine is on her mind and is reflected in this tweet, “Farhan has been lighting OUDH (agar wood) in the house!!smells devine!!if only v cud send smell tweets id send it 2 all of u!!hahahahahah!’’.

Shahid Kapoor experienced a meteoric rise on the popularity ladder after he tweeted, “Sonams bday today ….. Wonderful girl .. With the sweetest smile … Wishing her good luck n good health .. Sure she will do her parents’’.

But everyone’s favourite entertainer on Twitter, Salman Khan who is being himself, has unwittingly revealed his love for the apostrophe (which incidentally is a symbol for belonging to). “Y am I not tweeting for the past 3 day’s?’’ he asks his followers. All one can say is that hope’s that’s all’s well’s that end’s well.

Tags: bollywood, spello, Twitter, typo

Loading… new stranger

( I wrote this for The Times of India’s Crest edition )

It was my Twitter friend who introduced me to chatroulette.com, the new internet sensation and brainchild of 17-year-old Russian student Andrey Ternovskiy. It’s a simple enough contraption — no registration, no user names or passwords, just cam-to-cam conversations at the click of a mouse. The disconcerting part: the person in the webcam opposite you could be anyone anywhere in the world, one of the 1.5 million strangers who visits the free service everyday.

Journalistic obligations compelled me to connect, with some amount of trepidation. It isn’t easy being transported face-to-face into a random stranger’s domain. But it had to be done.

A few clicks had me reeling through a kaleidoscope of humanity. I met teen boys looking for boobs, a white-haired citizen breaking into a song, a gang of cheerleaders doing a shimmy, rooms of inebriated people grinning, and talking cameras pointed at pillows. With every consecutive ‘Next’ click, I came upon strange people talking strange languages, armed with props, puppets and pets; disguised with masks, wigs, sunglasses and superhero costumes. I was transported to bedrooms, dormitories, offices, kitchens and dark corners.

Two boys, tucked under a blanket, on a bed with the flag of Turkey in the background asked me where I was from. They then came closer to the camera and whispered, ‘Can you do webcam show?’ Obligingly, I swayed my head and started singing Strange Love. A few seconds later, I was singing to a blank black screen. I had been nexted.

Nexting is a verb. You get nexted when the stranger on the other side brutally clicks the ‘New game’ or ‘Next’ button immediately after seeing you (I later realised the boys were looking for a different kind of show). Mutual predilection keeps roulette exchanges going until one party decides to depart, and to my consternation, most of my conversations lasted for a fleeting few seconds, as I was ‘nexted’ by 16 people in two minutes.

Rejection hurt. It felt like I had lost my mojo and muchness. Girls didn’t want to talk to me, the boys asked me to put up performances and racists disconnected after I told them I was from India. And then there were those who I nexted. Like every chatroom, this site streams its share of sleaze from around the world. It’s a flasher’s hotspot and you may chance upon a macho type doing a full monty and other unmentionable acts. Statutory warning: To avoid embarrassment it is advisable not to chatroulette at work.

All this talk with strangers and randomness brought back teenage memories of Yahoo chatrooms where every conversation started with the ASL (age, sex, location) question, everyone had a pseudonym and anonymous role-playing was savoured. But then everything’s not a secret on the site. Another service called chatroulettemap pins screenshots of the site’s users to a map using their IP address and geolocation tools.

Having being nexted too many times, I decided to don a colourful wig and look alluring. A cryptic façade, I figured, might help me gel a little better with the demanding strangers. It worked wonders. My next encounter lasted for six whole minutes. We didn’t talk, just stared into each other’s eyes. Fido looked debonair. He was wearing a black tuxedo with a bow tie. But a few incomprehensible barks later, I was bored and decided it was time to wave out, and say goodbye to Fido the pug and his master who only stood behind, giggling at the advances we were making.

At 2 am, IST, the only time I can surf the web without someone peeping at my screen, I met WB Yeats from Toronto. He ended every line in a rhyme and thought his words were sublime. The game got better with every click and I have to admit, I have become a Chatroulette addict. It’s a great break from the mundane text and photo talk on Facebook and Twitter.

Tags: boredom, chat, chatroulette, webcam

An online invitation to grow offline

On Saturday morning, 120 Mumbaikars, most of them internet junkies, gave the city a green Christmas gift. They had been invited online by techies Satish Vijaykumar and Ranjeet Walunj to adopt an Ashoka or Neem sapling. The saplings were given free of cost with a condition: They should have an online profile with updates, photos and videos for the next two years.

Participants were encouraged to use the #sapling tag on networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us and Technorati. An award awaits the participant whose sapling grows the tallest at the fastest rate. The group plans to plant 10,000 saplings to the city by 2010.

The citizens’ initiative has been called The Sapling Project (www.thesaplingproject.com) and was started because the organizers felt that most tree plantation drives were carried out at the National Park or Aarey Milk colony, while colonies and buildings that actually need more trees were being ignored. ”Living is a different thing, we’re just about managing to stay alive,’’ says Vijaykumar, a Borivali-resident, avid tweeter and blogger at bombaylives.com.

Weeks before the drive, online invitations to visit Shivaji Park and adopt a sapling were sent out using Twitter, Facebook and blogs. His friend Walunj wants to tie up with the BMC. “A lot of places in the city can be designated sapling zones where trees are needed. So people who do not find place can come here and plant them’’.

Online networking with tweeters in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi has enthused locals to carry out similar plantation drives as part of the project. The next drive in Mumbai will take place in January and the organizers will visit areas like Dadar, Bandra, Andheri and Borivali with saplings in a van for distribution.

In the past, several sapling-planting initiatives have been launched in the city. In a move to restore the degraded periphery areas of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, GAIA Conservation Foundation is working with the Bombay Natural History Society to get citizens to plant saplings.

Over 10,000 saplings of indigenous trees like Red Silk Cotton, teak, Shivaji’s Sword, Khair, Shivan, Ziziphus and Flame of Forest have been planted by hundreds of people at the Goregaon site. NGO I Love Mumbai has been carrying out planting distribution drives in the city too.

But environmentalist Rishi Aggarwal says drives like these need support from experts who understand the ecology of each tree. ”You can’t plant a tree that will grow to have a 30-foot canopy on a narrow road. Plantation has to be an informed exercise,’’ says Aggarwal who wants the tree authority to have a separate website giving details of where saplings can be planted in the city using GPS coordinate. ”Location is the key criteria and the BMC seems to have failed in facilitating the good intentions of citizens in this area’’.