Our tryst with the Internet

Image from www.cicerolounge.wordpress.com 

With all the downloading of torrents, (okay) buffering of YouTube videos at 360p and the fastest browser available to us (that too free!!!!) the very definition of Internet has changed for us. 

I still remember the day when we pre-decided to share the cost of an hour of internet surfing which was available only at our school. The price we paid was to have a peek at the Internet and all the hype surrounding it. It was a price to know what the future held for us and why the internet was termed as a vast ocean of knowledge. At that age, we just did not understand what upload/ download speeds  were (or even what they meant), who was hosting the sites that were looking for and the biggest question of all: What are we looking for on the computer? 

From the hour I spent on the internet, I learnt three things : what Internet Explorer did, what Yahoo was and how to set up a Hotmail account. So strong are these memories that my password for this blog is just the same as the one for my first Hotmail account. Today, Hotmail is long gone and similar looks the fate of Yahoo, Mr. Bhatia is looking at the Short Message Service or the SMS industry and very few people use the Internet Explorer. All this in about 11 years. 

As we grew up and came across computers and the power of computing, came the age of Cyber Cafes. We visited these cyber cafes to recover lost passwords of Hotmail accounts and check the TV listings of wrestling matches or better still, the results. No, not the exam results, the match result for the wrestling that every Anil, Sunil and Pavan knew was fake. Computers became household equipment and our National Telecom provider, threw some pathetic internet packages at us. As the bundle of assignments grew, we became lazy and internet as the Web of Knowledge (Pun intended) was discovered. Imagine how lazy we are, that all we could find was Wikipedia. The truth was that although, we had a computer at home, the internet was not a requirement. We could visit Cyber Cafes and use the 'Save Web Page as' command (All Indians must bless the guy who wrote the code for that click we made) and make assignments at home. 

The reason I am nostalgic now is that a couple of days ago, some maintenance work disabled by internet connection. The frustration that came with it, broke the Ethernet cable that connects my computer to the Web of Knowledge/ Entertainment/ News/ Sports/Music/ Friends that are always 'Online' and I was disconnected for another day. Some pending work, forced me to save web pages at work and it was then that I realized how quick I was at that. Its purely the slow connection speeds, servers going down often and the power cuts at the cyber cafes that have made us 'street smart' in the online world as well. We are quick with our online work and excel at plagiarizing. So that leaves us with a lot of time making videos popular and encouraging the Biebers, 'Like'ing status updates and filling our mail boxes with unnecessary notifications, thus making our Unlimited Broadband Packages 'Paisa-Vasool'. 

Anyways, in a little over 10 years, we have come a long way from depending on schools for internet to carrying it in our pockets. Wonder where our tryst with the Internet will take us!