Summer

Here I am, sitting on my bed sparing all my thought to the sound of the wind blowing inside my room along with the faintest noise of the air customs helicopters hovering over Hudson river(damn you guys!). I look outside my window, I see people sunbathing on the lawn in front of the building(Bare topped!), kids playing in the park along with their moms and as far as my eye could see there is a stretch of huge buildings swarmed like mountains across a plain. I peep outside the window like a dog with his face outside the window of a speeding car. I feel the warm summer breeze flowing on my face. It only makes me say, "You lucky dog".

Feels wonderful, feels free. But why did it suddenly take me to a place thousands of miles away from here. Shrunk my age to 10-12 years with the racing thoughts of me and my friends playing cricket in the lush green fields of the country side? Probably that's because those were the best summer days of my life or maybe because I'm too arrogant to admit that I miss home or maybe I need a break. I have no clue, I just want to enjoy the moment before my obligations occupy my mind. This is one of the few moments I find for myself in an otherwise rush hour life.

I live in New York City, one of the greatest/busiest cities in the world and the pinnacle of corporate life. Many people back in my country say life is too mechanized here. But it only reminds me of one Red's sentence, "Get busy living or get busy dying". Toward which side are we moving?

Twitterized!

When web logs(or blogs) were first introduced, like a decade or half a decade ago?, they sat to serve a purpose. They were the voice of the common man whose voice is otherwise unheard of outside his teeny-tiny real world social network. (Wait, Did I just glorify the virtual online social networks? :-| ). It made him(or her) happy when his(or her) voice(or post) is heard(or read) and reacted by an unknown person thousand of kilometers away from there. It empowered him(?), elevated him(?) and most of all gave him a freedom of speech he never dreamed of. He voiced against the evil happenings around him, he expressed concerns for the less taken care of and he joined the virtual celebrations of pride and joy.

Life was good until 1 day came when people have become tweeple, blogosphere became twitosphere and a 4 para post came down to as little as a 3 sentence tweet. Microblogging. Everything is micro in it. Long urls became tiny urls, each tweet is subject to a meagre 140 characters victimizing poor vowels, most of the time they are squeezed out of the words to make the words look tiny and the website is a sad looking page of dullness. Sheer reduction, does it imply it is curbing/restricting the freedom blogs gave/give us? Not really. Rather it took conversations to the next level. How often do you get to speak to a celebrity(from a powerful politician(from Obama to Kevin Rudd to Shashi Tharoor) to a budding artist) directly? And the best of all is he/she replies you back. Intellectual tweets, informational tweets, impact-ual tweets and sometimes ignorable tweets. They changed the face and meaning of the word blog forever, which makes me, a blogger, sad. The cute looking blue sparrow is now everywhere in the world, tiny and powerful. On every social network, on every blog and every popular website hosting its own tiny url ready to be tweeted. The world as we see it is Twitterized!

Errr...

Are we living in a box? :-|