Five years on Facebook

Five years ago yesterday I signed up on Facebook. It was 2007, and back then everyone, including your mother, your old crush, your classmate from 20 years ago, your neighbour’s cat, every person with a mobile phone was not on Facebook as they do today. Orkut was the place to be, at least here in India. (By the way whatever happened to that guy Orkut, that founder guy? We used to hear rumours that for every click, for every scrap, for every friend added he earned this much dollars. Was that true?)

Well, back to Facebook, it was a bit confusing at first. What is a Wall? And where is my profile? How do I navigate? So many questions. I wasn’t active for a very long time, around two years. I started adding friends and whatnot in 2009. Then I started playing games, mainly Farm Town, Mafia Wars, Poker and that-word-game. I played Farm Town so much so that every tree, every bush, every flower reminded me of my “plants”.

I am not going to tell you every little thing I did, because you are also on Facebook (who isn’t?) and know full well the things we do out there.

The question now is, can we live without Facebook? There are some groups like Quit Facebook Day whose slogan is “Sick of Facebook's lack of respect for your data? Tell others that you're quitting too!” Their website recorded over 40 thousand FB quitters, not a very impressive number. But then every person who quit did not necessarily go and register there, so the number is probably much higher.

Six habits of watermelon seeds

What can one do with watermelon seeds?

1. Soak them in water until the water turns yellow.

2. Spell out words.

It's a beautiful day

Sometimes I think I might have OCD. I obsessively check the time, and the temperature. The worst of summer is behind us, and I'm glad because I was always checking the temperature and the forecast. I would check it before I go to sleep, as soon as I get up, if I wake up in the middle of the night, at any random time during the day. Yes, temperatures soared to 42 degrees, and never went below 30 even at night, even at 3 in the morning. And I would constantly compare the weather in our city with that of other cities around the world. It was always raining in Seattle, Tokyo was much colder than I imagined, Paris was always warmer than London, and Aizawl was warmer than both cities.

Yesterday I went out during the day, and it was a most beautiful day. Blue skies, the likes of which you haven’t seen in a long long time, perfectly clear sky, and big white fluffy clouds. I took a few pictures, here’s one:

Selling old newspapers

Newspapers accumulated over many months

Sold to a man who came in a bicycle