I think that the one thing we truly dread is being lonely. Not everyone defines loneliness in the same way, which is why you have some people who shrivel up and decay when they're compelled to stay alone, deprived of all social contact, away from family and friends, while you also have some others who seem resplendent in all their seemingly lonesome glory even in the geometric center of the Mongolian desert. No, it's not necessarily the presence of people that we need, but something less elemental but more intimate.
True loneliness is when there is nobody to hear you. So even if you're working offshore on an oil rig in the North Sea and your bunk bead is floating on a really rough chaos of waves, dreadfully close to pipes and silos full of oil waiting to explode at the slightest callous omission, you can rid yourself of loneliness by a simple telephone call or an e-mail or a blog, provided the blog attracts at least half a dozen responses reassuring you that your words fell on human ears. Even if that were to be robbed from you, the Halloween costume party where engineers dress up as health advisors and vice versa, the rig seems like a morphed version of the housing colony you grew up in.
We want to be heard.
Let me commit the dreaded blunder of taking you back a few years to an older version of MouthShut.com. I'm calling it a blunder because some blokes think nostalgia is a sheer waste of time and emotional energy and though I agree with them, I don't see why it warrants wrinkled noses and pedagogy in the comments section.
Back in the (good) old days, there was no Diary, which would have been quite a calamity had it become a question of where this write up would fit. There were no gifts, so all of you smug about being proud owners of airplanes and hovercrafts (nice suggestion, eh?) would perhaps have found it dull and poorly remunerative. And there were no photo albums, so people either had the same face for months at a stretch or their faces changed and you could play a very interesting game of keeping track of how he or she looked fifteen days ago. Compared with the overload of features we have today, MouthShut at that time was designed as a normative, matter-of-fact consumers forum, which encouraged people to write about shampoos and television sets, cars and places of tourist interest and discouraged them from boring the world with advice on how to choose bangles and rambling accounts of their visits to Mumbai or their youngest child's hidden acrobatic talents.
But it was a nice place. Devoid of distractions like gifts and albums and diaries where you can do just about anything, people actually spent time and mental energy writing their reviews and did the same thing while reading what other's wrote. It was an interesting concert of jobless people, all of them spending hours at a stretch writing and then going through what others wrote, carefully tearing it down.
What is the point of this glorious description of the virtual past? What I'm trying to drive home is that MouthShut at a point of time was for people who wanted to hear and be heard, even if it was for placid, mundane, everyday things like soap bars and automobiles. Consumers have one thing in common- they've all bought something or the other and out of ten things bought, four are subjects of complaints of varying levels of seriousness. There you go, you have the initial conditions for bonding satisfied, you have a vent to express your satisfaction / dissatisfaction about your purchases and then you can diversify into things like whether the review made a good piece of writing to recommending public transport over owning your own vehicle.
It's not like that any longer and I feel like my space has been occupied by intruders. The corporations of the world have infiltrated even this little window I had to talk and converse like a human, repeating their ugly message that I am now just a hanger for them to hang their manufactured goods on, a consumer, a buyer, a things-collector. So I guess I should give a satisfied burp at the points I've earned by adding this post to my collections, write half a dozen or more of these till I have enough to get myself a fruit punch or a vacation or a pair of sunglasses to flash on my MS profile as someething I cuold buy out of what I wrote.
Did you read it? Did you like it? Did you agree with it?
These questions are for bovines to answer. The human is now just a consumer, a collector of things...
