LONG, LONG ago (in terms of Internet time), there was a virtual country named Orkut. It was a wild country where ‘frands’ and ‘sheep’ ran wild. Stalkers stalked and talkers talked in a visceral mishmash of puerile conversation and voyeuristic voyages across profiles. There were more scraps than metal. It was a turbid torrent of young Indian expression, a parent-free outlet for the high pressure libido locked up by conservative society. The nation of Orkut had but one motto — to knock the marble from the Goli soda of pent-up adolescent energy. It was free. It was unsanitary. It was glorious.
It was the birthplace of memes. The Legend of Sam Anderson was born there. It spawned a new dialect of the English language. It was Myspace meets 4chan for vada and coffee. People who carried Ayn Rand were on a level footing with folks who flaunted Chetan Bhagats. Orkut was caste-less. As hard as the elite tried to voice their “concerns” about privacy and inappropriate content, Orkut continued to display a bejewelled middle finger and left a colourful scrap advertising v14gr4 on their profiles. But the douchebags of English-educated urban India did not want to be seen at the same level as someone spelling “what” as “wat”. They wanted a “cleaner”, “saatwik” environment. They wanted the effete absence of male reproductive organs that is Facebook. They wanted no bucolic agriculture. They preferred Farmville. They wanted to take lame polls on Hollywood movies.
They also wanted more privacy and for that, they sold their soul to Facebook which, like a social networking Enron, recently changed the dictionary definition of the word “privacy” so that it could tell advertisers that you tend to drink a lot of beer and pass out while wearing Revlon lipstick. You see — in Orkut, people scratch their privates in public. In Facebook, they scratch in private and it “accidentally” gets made public by a privacy policy that many people describe using the word “public”. Without the letter “l”.But the migration happened, and it happened, like it tends to in India, in droves. Early citizens of Facebook sang paeans to the cleanliness and civility of the place. They praised its privacy policy and convinced people who could not think for themselves (like me) to migrate to the new promised land.
AND I find myself, after two years in the desert of uncreative banter and pointless games that is Facebook, yearning for the streetside bacteriopolis that was the Orkut Biryani, I am starting to find the elite vegetarian fare of FB rather bland. I want to get out of the Brahminised world of ritual pokes and Farmville Homams and dance with the lecherous wolves of Orkut. I logged back in after what seemed like ages, like an NRI at the gates of the one-BHK hovel of his parents, and I had to rub my eyes. Like a streetside pav bhaji shop giving you mineral water, Orkut now looks like Facebook. Its freespirited back has been broken, ironically enough, by the loss of its most useless citizens, the social networking Brahmins, the twice born (once in Orkut, then in FB) and it has, in an attempt to gain a “cleaner” image, thrown out the baby with the bath water.
The old Orkut was an unsanitary meeting of unlike minds, the kind that might have made it another 4chan. Facebook is like this Victorian club of spoiled, moneyed gents. Nothing creative will ever come out of it.