On Orkut

You were the stud in college. Maybe the erudite literature maven, or maybe the long haired, tattooed and bearded lead-vocalist of the college band. Maybe you were THE babe, who all of us guys worshiped. Basically, you were beyond the 'somebody'. You were the real thing. You never needed friends, they needed you. They were always there at your doorsteps, maybe outside your class, waiting for the boring lecture to get over so that you will appear, you will deliver your pearls of wisdom, maybe you will play a riff of that Joe Sat song, or maybe you will not say a word and just brush aside the gasps of the guys along the way.. and yes, you WERE looking heavenly that day. In short, you never needed them, they needed you.

We, we were just about toeing the somebody line. The last few folks in the somebody bus. We looked down upon the nobodies; we tittered at them and their gaucheness, while you expectedly (and expertly) ignored them.

We needed you. We needed you to compliment us maybe once in a while to make us feel good about ourselves, and confirm to the rest of the world that we were not nobodies. We, more than anybody else, needed you. We needed affirmation, we needed validation. We never had the chutzpah, we never had the savvy, all that we ever had was the want. We wanted to be you.

We had friends. People liked us. That's an alien term, isn't it, to you? A pedestrian thing, a junta thing, na, to you? You never cared if people liked you, you wanted them to worship you, you wanted them to deify you. And they did. We did. I did.

When we had a breakdown, in college, we had friends to succor us, to shore us up. But you never broke down. You were perfect. You were college gods. You were the stratosphere. And we were strictly the above-average. We were craning our necks to get ourselves above mediocrity. And we did manage that, didn't we…. But we wanted you to notice….. and probably you did so too, in those two occasions in four years of college. Thank you. We needed those two moments.

Yes, you can criticize orkut. You never needed it. We did. We do. Still.