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Living in Times of Terror, Reaching out in Cyberspace

A couple of years ago, my then 
boss sent me an invite to join the 
MySpace community: “You can be in touch with everyone — and everything,” he informed me gravely. It was an invitation that I, bizarrely enough, accepted. It probably had to do with his being my boss.

I spent half an hour writing down stuff like what my interests were (watching movies, definitely not surfing the Net — and pretty much nothing else), and how I’d best describe myself (I won’t obviously reveal the lame lines I typed out; let’s just say that I’m amazed that a large number of people still want to be friends with me, and that even now I get at least two mails every week professing so-and-so has tagged me). If I remember correctly, I accessed MySpace exactly twice after my time-consuming exercise. Today, I’ve even forgotten my user ID and password.

Three days after the Mumbai terror attacks, my ex-boss, the same gentleman who had invited me to invade MySpace, called me from India. He gave 
me the shocking news of a Delhi journalist — who I didn’t know personally, but had heard of — being killed at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. “I have no 
idea of what’s happening back home, thanks for letting me know,” I whispered, horrified.

“To be in the loop, you ‘have’ to be on online networking sites,” he reiterated.

A couple of weeks ago, while his city burnt, 29-year-old Mumbaiite Harish Iyer put his mobile number on his blog so that friends and family members 
of suspected victims, from all over the world, could feel free to contact him 
to get information about their loved ones’ whereabouts.

Khaleej Times did a story on Harish and his blog. After the story appeared on November 29, it felt wonderful to learn that he received a great many mails and calls from the Middle East. That’s the power of connectivity — at the click of a mouse.

I learnt about it a few months ago when I started blogging myself.

Normally, it is a Net-action that goes completely against my grain. But now, I’ve started realising that since we live in abnormal times, it’s the simple things of life — like being a well-wisher and reaching out and caring — that stay with you as you hurtle from one uncertain day to the other.

One of the regular visitors to my 
blog, for instance, is coming to Dubai with his wife and a few of their friends from Delhi.

He wants me to suggest names 
of some tourist attractions they can visit, and he has confided in me how he is not looking forward to the shopping expeditions his wife has planned. 
The rupee-dirham conversion is hurting, he wrote.

Another blog contact lives in Abu Dhabi — and I have a standing invitation to go over to her place and spend a day. She, in fact, suggested that I bring my friends along. And yes, I have her mobile number in my phonebook.

Last Tuesday, as I was leaving for New Delhi for a couple of days, someone flagged me on my blog about the terror alert in the Indian capital and how the airport could be a possible target. I saw that much before I read the related news report on an Indian newspaper’s website. “Be very careful,” my blog visitor advised.

It’s nice to know that there are people out there in cyberspace who care for you and rely on you as the world, increasingly, becomes a more and more dangerous place to live in.

So, who knows, maybe one day I 
will consider having a Facebook 
profile. I know I said earlier on that I don’t plan to — but then, life always has other plans.

Sushmita Bose is KT’s Features Editor. 
She can be reached at
sushmita@khaleejtimes.com