Facebook Is Calling, Where Are You?

I wasn’t a big fan of Facebook earlier. Found it very user-unfriendly. Felt there was way too much going-on (the homepage when you log in is quite cluttered).

I also found it extremely annoying that whenever you want to accept any of the requests that one of your friend sends you, or take a quiz, or play a game on Facebook, you have to first navigate through numerous pop-ups, including having to add a list of friends whom the request/quiz/game would be forwarded to. I never had the patience for all of this. Even now I have, like, 100 requests pending. I used to barely manage to accept request from friends to add them to my Friends’ List.

Orkut, on the other hand, was much simpler to use! A friend leaves you a scrap, you scrap them back. It’s easy to get to newly uploaded pictures of friends. No annoying pop-ups to deal with!

Then I realized that all my friends from the US, who I had lost touch with after college (mainly b/c we were lazy to mail each other), were on Facebook! So I was forced to become friends with the social networking website, and the more I started using it, the more I started liking it.

For one, there are no creeps on Facebook who keep asking you to become friends or leave you unsolicited messages. Secondly, it made it very easy to stay in touch with college friends – scribbling on their wall is much faster than writing a mail! And people are quicker in scribbling back on your wall than replying to your mail.

I got to know the whereabouts of so many friends I’d kind of lost touch with. For instance, one of my friends who was perpetually confused about what she wanted to do in life is now studying to become a doctor! Now, medicine is a profession you need to be very sure you want to take up, due to the sheer amount of patience and dedication required to see yourself through med-school.

Another friend, a triple black belt in Taekwondo, has his own Taekwondo studio now where he teaches the martial art to kids. Another friend has gotten into Child Therapy, helping kids deal with trauma. Yet another friend went on to study Cultural Anthropology at Yale. She went to Tanzania for 3 months on a scholarship program which required her to do some primary research among people of a particular ethnicity in Dar-es-Salaam. And another friend – hold your breath, you travel lovers – went on to study Archeology at Stanford and is gallivanting all over Europe doing excavations! I remember her trying to break her head learning Greek & Latin in college, so she'd be able to do this. She now hovers at all the historical places in Italy & Greece that I’ve always dreamt of going to. I live vicariously through her pictures.

Moral of the Story? Some things in life take getting used to, for everything else... :)