The Bored Engineer

A couple of years back, Facebook launched a new feature titled “See First” which basically meant that if you interact with certain people more than others on Facebook, these ‘preferred’ people would get a precedence. Couple this with the change in Facebook’s algorithms wherein this change was internalized making your ‘interactive’ contacts appear first, the entire social media experience was polarized. I have about 350 friends but after these features were implemented my interaction was limited with a selected group of 5-7 people basically turning Facebook into a Stalking Machine. Moving on from Facebook, this feature was rapidly embraced by other platforms as well including many news outlets and apps which show you the tailor made news feed, specially customized for you. The drawbacks of this system were soon realized as people found – just as in the case of Facebook – that this had led to shrinking of their online reach and they were now getting a lot of stories related to a same...

The dazzle of their beautiful lives bewildered him. He spent countless hours looking at their picture perfect life. He watched all of them equally but somehow she overshadowed all the others. He would be engrossed in peeping into someone else’s lives when suddenly she would make her presence felt and he would leave all his active pursuits to follow her. Looking at that face of hers, with the perfect smile of hers. She had a load of friends, roaming around with them and discussing all the fun they had. Sometimes he wondered if she did really have all that fun or if it was all a charade designed to make him miserable. Then what if she’s as lonely and miserable as I am. Why does she keep boasting her friends all the time, she could break the world of glass she had created for her to live in a house of bricks with him. Thoughts troubled him and he thought about it a lot. It was not all that bad. Sometimes he understood that he was trapped in a cycle of unending misery that he had inf...

While we are here sitting in relatively comfortable dwellings gossiping about college, cricket or even Bollywood, complaining about stuff we don’t have and what we deserve as a nation in the 21 st century (internet connectivity is surely gonna top that list!), while we go on with our lives there is a woman raped in some war torn African nation, a child orphaned in some Arab nation under siege by a terrorist group, a country’s heritage is being destroyed, the natural wealth of some place in India is being plundered, the basic democratic rights of people in China are being trampled. We have fixated our eyes so strongly on the brightness that our future promises to hold that we miss out on the darkness spread wide in present times. We go on with our lives and there isn’t much that we can do as individuals to change the course of some place thousands of miles from where we are, but does that absolve all our responsibilities as a global citizen. Isn’t every murder that is happening...

‘Kashmir’ - an issue so volatile it can polarize the sanest of the minds into mind numbing extremism. Whenever Kashmir is on the boil or in the headline for any reason even the most liberal sounding people on my Facebook friend-list suddenly tear apart all their identities and fall into two categories: Kashmiris (mostly living outside the state and in other parts of India) who suddenly feel the need to highlight the ‘human right abuses’ which may or may not have been happening and people from rest of India who feel the need to thump their chest and abuse Kashmiris. While the silent majority looks on, occasionally expressing its dismay over the human right abuses and occasionally supporting the anti-terror operations of our armed forces (anti –terror not anti-protestors). I have been a part of the silent majority as well, looking around at people from both sides calling each other names and ‘highlighting’ facts which in their view are suppressed by ‘vested interests’. I do not ...