I was allergic to dust and smoke right from the early nineties, when I started living in Kathmandu in pursuit of higher education. Hence, I did not take to smoking on a regular basis. However, if you can call reading an addiction, I was addicted to books. I used to take books every time I went to the restroom, and flip through them while I was in there. So I could safely say that I was not addicted to anything. Until now.[break]
At an age when almost half of my hair is gray and I am facing a midlife crisis akin to Hamletian paranoia, coupled with varying family and social responsibilities, I must admit that I have become a twitter addict.
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I spend hours reading and researching twitter feeds. Such reading gives me the kind of satisfaction a woman experiences after sex, rather than the kind of frustration a man experiences after intercourse. However, I feel bad that due to my addiction, my iPhone goes to the restroom with me instead of a book. Since months, the books I bought or issued from my library are sitting on the table in my reading room.
Since summer holidays began two weeks ago, my daughter has already finished reading 10 of her 15 mandatory summer reading books on kindle, and I have not even touched the one I had downloaded nearly three months ago. Both of my kids, 10 and five years of age respectively, take their books to the restroom. I had no idea that kids would come to develop their parent’s habits as their own.
But I have no complaints regarding my twitter addiction as long as I get tweets that are full of life, even though, as Prof Alan Rosenblat, my colleague at Johns Hopkins University, likes to put “A tweet has the life of about 6 to 10 minutes.” Still, twitter feeds contain interesting things. Most of the times, they do not tell you the complete story. How can one tell a story in a mere 140 words? I struggle real hard when I have to. But there ARE gifted wordsmiths who not only tell you a story, but narrate an epic, or unfurl a long unsolved mystery, or open their heart out and show it to you in such a way that you are left wondering with your mouth wide open. They tell you in 140 characters what pictures can’t.
Gone is the cliché that says “a picture is worth a thousand words.” If pictures were to ‘effectively’ tell a story of thousand words, why would twitter thrive in the most advanced societies in the times of Facebook, which is mostly used to share and comment on photos?
I must admit that there are a few people (whose names may be their own or pseudonyms) that my eyes scan for in the tiny screen of my iPhone every time I open the social networking site. I search for them the way I used to search for my girlfriend (now my beloved other-half) in the crowd of similarly dressed girls coming out from the gate of Padmakanya Campus in Dillibazar. The posts of these people are like freshly brewed coffee. They do not demand your attention, but they are so stunningly attractive that you just follow them. Some posts are like music from next door which is so clear that it makes you feel that your music system is old, although it may not be the case. Their sense of humor, their meaningful tweaking of colloquial language, and their honest opinions on the anomalies of political life in Nepal keep me glued to twitter. While I am on it, I never feel that I am physically 76,000 miles away from where these posts are generated. Some of the tweeters happen to be my friends or relatives, and some happen to be my students I had taught previously in schools and colleges while in Nepal.
The tweets that I follow are so interesting and so full of irony, pun and observation of life that they make me want to research their creators. Thanks to the internet, no matter how distant and dismissive a pseudonym people use on twitter, an average internet user can find their identities. Wanting to know more about the creators is one thing that keeps me glued to the internet.
From twitter I get to see the new generation that is getting ready to lead the nation. I am proud to say that I am a twitter addict, because it shows me what I want to see. I see complete pictures in 140 or fewer characters, composed by the engineers of tomorrow.
The author, host of a TV Talk Show “American Conversations: Connecting Frontiers” is a linguist-on-call at Random House
kpsharma1971@yahoo.com
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