a one month affair with yahoo chat and online friends

am back from a long and tiring week .. a week full with string of emergencies...of visiting hospitals and the depression such visits get. i had this incomplete post in the drafts.. am publishing it .. no wish to make it better or to complete it.


i am not new to yahoo chatting .. but its been years since i chatted on yahoo. last one month or so in evenings i tried to do something different from the usual stuff of reading or watching tv.. and did some yahoo chatting. by yahoo chatting i mean going to yahoo public rooms and talking to strangers.

thats abt a month back .. and in this one month ive learnt nothing much has changed at yahoo..

• youve got new captcha bot filters... which surprisingly fail to keep the bots away. these bots are so intelligent that they can come close to winning the turing test.
  
• It is still considered to be a perversion and crime to chat with a person of same sex.. even in the Islamic chat rooms , the first question that gets asked is 'asl' and when u say 'male' and if the opposite side also is 'male' you get an immediate reply saying 'male here too, bye'.
• the islamic chat rooms are either filled with ppl who keep sending verses ..or playing recorded chants of verses on voice chat, or with ppl who vent out their anger against islam by choicest insults on islam and muslims.
• it is very difficult to start and keep a good discussion going in the open rooms.
  

Whatever it is ...i found talking to strangers taxing and more when you realise the kind of anonymity yahoo offers ... after sometime i quit it taking in Ghalib`s advice.

haan wo imaan parast nahi .. jaao wo bewafa sahi
jin ko ho deen-o-dil azeez uski gali mein jaaye kyon

i dont know abt deen.. but dil is very azeez to me .. it is better not to go to the gali which diverts the dil from its way.

best part of this one month stint is that i met two very nice people (of course girls .. me a guy and cant get another guy to chat) one of them a journalist from pak, and another from indonesia.

in comparison i was on orkut for a longer time than this.. i did like this concept in beginning. good place to find long lost friends (it is another thing that i never found a single one of my childhood friends) . similar to yahoo when it comes to online friends..a good place for online dating , flirting. go to any girl`s profile u see hundreds of scraps asking for friendship and same number of cute and sweet messages glorifying the friendship.

i have seen many profiles with hundreds of friends . technically, i think it is not possible to have so many friends and still do justice to all as a friend. but then it is a matter of online friendships.. a girl fr.bg tells me how good and proud she feels when she gets so many requests for friendship. these are her words.. 'there are soo many ppl who want to chat with me , and who want to be my friend...it feels great and makes me proud'. of course friendship here means sending cute forwards .. feel good words about the greatness of friendship..making it the best thing in the world.

i cannot avoid comparing this with what i think of religions.. i believe religion to be a good way of hiding one's weaknesses .. religious chores and the feel good things in religion to keep you confident enough that you are on the right way and hide the hollowness of beliefs. the same way the feel good messages in these so called friendships hide the hollowness of these relationships. the height of it is when these relationships are compared with those which are selfless and which dont depend on these feel good words to survive.. like the one between mother and child.