By Malay Desai
Founder, Punchlines Creative Solutions
It was a tiny message on Twitter last week - – ‘Orkut will not be available after September 30, 2014’ - which made me commit an act I had abstained from since 2007. After Google announced the closing down of the first social networking site for many of my generation, I had to make the embarrassing walk down memory lane, which turned out much like visiting a teenage crush who later turned out to be a social misfit.
First up, I noticed my carefully edited, cropped profile picture, evidently meant to impress the ladies in the ‘visitors to your page’ links. It was right from my college days, 2004-2007, when Facebook was just making its first strides that would later ring Orkut’s death knell. There were ‘scraps’, which were once upon a time a currency so abundant, I knew many who would pay cyber cafes to check them and others who sent SMSes to the then four-digit services to receive scraps on their Nokia 3310s and Moto Razrs.
And just like that first affair in school, my engagement with the ‘Purple O’ began with obsessive zeal... to check out profiles of my friends and their friends and so on. Then there were the life-altering ‘testimonials’, which for some self indulgent reason meant so much – let’s call them candy flosses of that sugary sweet era. There are 147 friends now, most of whom have display pictures in which they look five times leaner, and the one community I had ‘founded’ with a bunch of friends – ‘Hathoda Academy of Joking’ has a ‘last post’ from 2009. Awkward!
As Google pulls the plug on its social network, which was largely in a vegetative state from the past five years, let’s grieve the death of the ‘Orkutiya’, that lecherous Indian male who used a fake profile to make ‘frandships’. After the vicious ‘trolls’ of Facebook and Twitter which spew venom at will these days, those Orkutiyas seemed more innocent.
We’ve been charmed by a fascinating b*tch called Facebook, who by looking corporate, friendly and slutty at the same time, makes Orkut look like a tart who tried too hard. But let’s not shy away from the fact that just like Blackberrys, tazos, that poster of your Bollywood hero and that unsent letter to your college crush, Orkut too was a part of growing up. Thankfully, my generation knows the ‘good’ of social media from the bad, and has only evolved to be wiser to use the social web to one’s advantage.
Many have come, gone and stayed after that tempestuous first affair, and Google even aborted a one-year-old child called Buzz, but our embarrassing memories of purple O will remain ours... like that awful half-naked picture from your family’s Goa trip or the time when you let out a wet fart during an interview.
Until September 30, 2014 then, gather all your memories from it. Or burn them.
Feedback: desai.malay@gmail.com
