A dear friend of mine is leaving for her studies at Tepper School,CMU…. One fine evening, I noticed that her GTalk status message read “I am tired of answering questions.” I enquired what that was all about. “A 100 people pinged me to ask me when I am leaving!!! I am tired of replying…”, she replied.

Well, my friend… Welcome to the Internet-enabled smaller world of the 21st century…

I remember the good old days… You had to read newspapers or magazine to know what was happening around the world… Else you did have to make it to your television for the 9 p.m. news… [Lazy people like moi used to just watch Pranoy Roy's 'The World this week' on Doordarshan 9 p.m. Fridays ]

You had an “analog” telephone which came in only one color - black. You either wrote down your friends’ numbers on a sheet stuck to the wall or in a nice leather bound directory. I used to remember a couple of my landline numbers (No mobiles yet) back then…

I used to visit a dingy ‘cyber cafe’ close to home to access the Internet… They had a 56.6 kbps connection. Later, to my elation, they upgraded to a 64 kbps line… That meant my only e-mail inbox opened up a minute earlier than before…

All this was before I hit college… Things have changed since then…Enough nostalgia already…

Now I use a 4 mbps line, which is just not enough for my second-life avatar… I never could become a ‘model’ in my real life, given my mirror-cracking looks… But then, hey, why not lead a virtual life??? This is straight out of the Sidney Sheldon novel “Tell me your dreams”… A manifestation of Multiple Personality Disorder?

From Copenhagen, I now make calls and chat with friends all over the world… Trivandrum, Mumbai, SF, NewCastle, Texas [Courtesy VOIP and Skype-Out]

4 different mail ids… An orkut account… A facebook account… LinkedIn… Google reader to address my RSS requirements… Twitter to keep the world updated about my boring life… A MyBlogLog account to collate all my various social networking accounts (which have become quite unmanageable, really!!!)… del.icio.us account to hold my bookmarks online… Last.fm subscription to listen to the latest music on demand… The list goes on… To top it all, a Second Life avatar to live a life different from the one I am enjoying right now…

Has information tech changed our lives? Hell, yeah!!! It has made the world I live in smaller… Do I like it? Now it’s all about time-management [Given the number of accounts I hold online] That’s the new challenge.