A Smaller World

It was light at the end of the tunnel, literally. After looking for a lost (or as he had thought for long) notebook, he finally found it at desolate corner of his room. Well, this is usually what happens when you don't clean your room for aerons (or ages?). So, it's not that romantic, is it? More so, he was starting to recover from a injuries sustained during an accident he had a month earlier. Hence, he was beginning to feel restless. He was done with his share of movie downloads via torrents and staring at countless blog posts. And now, he was creating a parallel world, or was entering a parallel universe rather. His newly-acquired prosperity had enabled him to acquire a BlackBerry, and he had started using that to meet new people from places where he still wishes to travel.

But why was he looking for a notebook then? His new world, known more popularly as Twitter, had held him in thrall for several weeks. He used to jot down important events in his life in his notebook, a habit he had given up after he started dating his college classmate - seven years to be precise. But, he suddenly felt the urge to revive the habit again. He had joined Twitter just as he had joined Facebook - as a fad that had caught on. But now, his world had increasingly begun to revolve around those 140 characters that were his window to talk to his friend from Paris to Patna. Each and every punctuation mark or emoticon had started to from images in his brain. Though he knew in part that he had taken refuge in the virtual world to shield himself from the recoil generated by his turbulent relationship which had just ended, he was now entering the second phase. The period of recovery had been another factor that had confined him to his room and his timeline (the Twitter equivalent of the Facebook homepage).

When he finally found the notebook, his adventures with pen and paper could not be revived immediately as the LED was flashing on his phone. And the person on the other end was one of his Twitter friends. She had just come back from a work trip to Bangalore and wanted to talk to him about her new love interest. She was one of the few who knew his real name, since he had chosen not to dislose it on his Twitter profile. He could imagine her blushing on the other end of the line, and this was precisely when he saw a barrage of tweets congratulating Mihir and Sulbha - a couple who had met on Twitter and had decided to get engaged the following month. At the same time, a couple of message arrived from his online friends in the US and France, asking about his health. As he was beginnning to soak in what was popping up on the computer screen, Humour (as he was known to his Twitter friends) started talking to DK: 'Hey, humans tweet like birds these days. Won't they fly on their own pretty soon? '