Jee! Talk!

Gmail users might be aware of these situations that I am just going to describe. This is what we do each morning – wake up, go to the loo, POL (sounds similar to LOL? Yes…Pee out Loud!) and then brush our teeth. This is analogous to what we do each morning in office - put our PCs on, login, reply to official mails and then log into Gmail! It has become a habit for us and I won’t be surprised if few years down the line we find this thing in a kid’s textbook saying ‘Daily Gmail habits’!

So why has Gmail penetrated our virtual lives so much? What do we actually do on Gmail? Keep our status available or busy and wait for people to email us? Or keep searching some or the other email all the time? Or keep emailing others all the time? I would really like to meet the person who says yes to these questions. Hardly does anyone use Gmail as an official email id given the free email ids available for each company’s employee. Then what the hell do we do there?

I think the answer lies in one of the features of Gmail, Gtalk. Let’s go back to almost where we started, slightly changing the question that we asked. What do we do once we log into Gmail? Do we check the few emails that have come in the few hours we have been offline? No! We look for the green and red buttons (with a slit :)) that appear on the left hand side of the page, showing our friends who are online. After having looked briefly at those buttons and counting them somewhere at the back of the mind, we start looking for names, in alphabetical order. We look for the certain characters, certain names and the colour of the button against their name. We wait for the colour of the buttons to change at times. We may not start talking to those having green/red buttons, or sometimes, with the ones we are expecting to have green/red buttons, but we may still keep going back, again and again to the page to check if their buttons are still coloured. And sometimes we even wait for the names to swing left and right on the minimized window of Gmail :) I find it pretty interesting!

And that’s not the only thing that we do. We do wait for some buttons to turn green/red and as soon as they do, we just can’t stop ourselves talking to them. Whether the discussions have a meaning or not is a different thing. After all, who cares! It’s the virtual adda where we meet! Right?

I am happy to be one of the users of Gmail and have the privilege of experiencing all the things mentioned above. I would really like to thank Gmail, for making the talk possible! I would have felt really lonely in this crowded world in its absence. Thanks once again!

Fly

Aeroplanes have always fascinated me. I remember looking up at the sky, looking for them every time I heard them roaring. Looking through the trees, behind tall buildings, in all directions, just to get a glimpse of it. I remember looking at the thick white trail some of them left behind and then following it till the end just to find out the one that had made it. I remember sleeping on terrace at night, staring at the dark sky with twinkling dots and then finding a flashing, moving dot, an aeroplane traveling at night. There are many sweet memories linked to the last one :)

A year back I got to board an aeroplane for the first time. And I have boarded it a few number of times after that. Of course not to say that I have stopped looking for them when they pass roaring now. The curiosity still remains the same. In fact it has increased a bit more.

The only difference is that some time back, I used to curiously look at the plane passing by and now I even look at the earth as it carries me in it. As the plane takes off, it not just carries us away from the land but also sets our brain in the zoom out mode. The people, the houses, the trees, the buildings – all, decrease in dimension as we start flying. It just gives you an amazing view of things, whether on land from which you are moving away or the sky in which you are flying.

Of the few things that I remember as I have flown a few times in the past year are –

- View of the cities, full of bright dots at night. And as the plane lands, the light sources – the street lamps, the headlights etc. which appeared initially as points, increasing in diameter and becoming full big sources, lighting everything around. The straight lines formed by the point light sources emerge as roads lighted by the street lamps. I just can't describe it in words here!

- View of the sun rising at the horizon.

- A splendid view of the clouds, looking like blobs of cotton, flooring the sky :)

- View of the plane passing through the clouds, with the clouds knocking at the windows and the body of the plane, as if asking us to allow them to enter inside :)

I still love to watch the planes from the ground and wonder if someone sitting inside could see me staring at them :)