A Tryst with facebook

When one of my friends was told that I am on facebook she blurted out a response with her eyes bulged out "What Nasnin?... you on facebook? That's really a news! I could hardly imagine you social networking since your nature seem so far from such "silliness" as some people of "your type" would call it.Your face would have been the last one I would have searched for in it". Well...the sudden exclamation of my friend didn't spring up surprise in me as her perception about "me" and "my type" and her idea about "my nature" was in no way unfamiliar to me though that perception was mixed with misconceptions which I badly wanted to attack, but always remained as a "rattle in my throat".

If I try to figure out the reasons which persuaded me to be in fb, the resultant explanation will be some clichéd expressions like" for pleasure" , "to keep in touch with the disconnected friends", "to pass time in a more out- flowing way" and so on. What ever be the inconspicuous motive I started "facebooking" at my leisurely evenings, at my lazy holiday afternoons, in between my ever unfixed study hours... At the threshold my humble expectation was that it may help deluging my pent up mental friction from my obese mind satchel glutted with the dusty pieces of self expression. Desiring this effect in my mind I updated my "statuses", uncorked the perfume bottle of my ever admired quotes, displayed my "favourites", "commented" on the relevant and the trivial. I got back in touch with some of the friends ,some I bothered about, some I least bothered about to meet again. I saw people idealizing themselves, saw a whole range of intentional and unintentional emotional exhibition by the mirror of language, people trying to be different, some genuinely  and some not....people who have grown silly though that silliness proved incongruent to their person at times...but still silly as they became blind to that incongruous silliness.

 The realization of the visible fact that, that very despised self absorption (the peeling off the self absorption was one of my subconscious motifs which I recognized later) got nourished and flourished and triumphantly propped up its head every time I "faced this book" dislocated even more the already dislocated wry patterns of the "self". It spoiled my evenings of sweet solitude...those pleasurable sittings with a 'not seeking anything', 'not running after anything' attitude rather than dragging my mental status to a status space , before people who don't care at all or who pretend to care with a compliment of clicking a "like" or typing out a "self-proving comment".


Perhaps I was just seeking an identity in a new way, exhausted by the hammering questions of identity crisis to which I could not have remained impervious, added to the other exhaustions by the constantly weired  concealments of my furtive mind. As the temporary abstentions from 'facebooking" gained me back the vanishing sweetness of solitude, I decided to keep off permanently. The gullibility and vulnerability of my nature insisted me to accept the truth that it's not my cup of tea. But still the "deactivation" of my account rather than the "deletion" of it explicates the never halting wheel of escapism from which man is incapable of an ultimate extrication.


Looking from a different perspective,the moments in facebook and the people I met in it, people sprawled all over like the different colour patterns in a cubism painting, or the abstract elements in a modernist's canvas, or simply the detailed mirror images of real faces, faces untouchable..."a heap of broken images"...just got stashed away in that mind satchel in a disguised solidity (the solidity is because of the "deactivation" and not the "deletion" which allows me to go back to it to if I choose to go back, for a real visit unlike the airy visit to the past by memories).


PS: I remember my prof saying "When people ask me why I am not on facebook I usually tell them that it's because I love to keep my face in a book!". I think it speaks for some of us too.