Sunday Snipppets
By Venkatesh Raghavan
I recall the time when I was new to social media and to what use it was put to. At that point of time, there was no separate categorization for social media messages, primary messages and so on. All the mail used to come to my gmail inbox. I had less than 80 friends on Facebook. However, this too proved to be an irritant as my mailbox was flooded with notifications on what XYZ or ABC has posted on his or her Facebook wall.
I kept reading the notifications that got posted on FB and actually lost interest in using it as none of the messages that were posted was in any way connected to my professional or say even pet interests in life. It took me nearly four months before I realized that FB was a forum to post opinions and perspectives on current issues from different spheres of action like politics, sports, entertainment and so on. In addition, I noticed that there were quite a few posts on food they had in different ambient restaurants. After ruminating for a while, I decided that I can use the FB platform for putting across my point of view on different topics of interest be it current political affairs or trends that are happening in the Indian economy or for that matter sounding a congratulatory note to our sportspersons whenever they excelled on the global platform.
Also read: Sunday Snippets: Desert cricket and the world cup
Thus began my long uninterrupted journey with FB, where I kept posting my views and at times responded to other writers. When I began penning, I thought of presenting narratives on the Golden Age of Greece, the Holy Roman Empire, the crusades and Holy wars. My friend Bobby Anthony informed me that it would be better if I stick to subjects that had contemporary interest. He bluntly said, “People of the FB era are those who believe what they don’t know is not worth knowing. Pointless dwelling on such things like Peter the Great or say Mary Anitonette”
That’s when I began putting on my thinking cap. I decided to start a column that by and large focused on political satires. It was titled, “FROM VENKY ON GRASS.” Initially the responses were somewhat muted. However, over a period of time, as my satires targeted all, including local civic body in Mumbai, behavior of the government seated at the Centre and at times unfavorable economic policies that surfaced in the public domain, the responses I received were heartening and in fact there were many who demanded to know when my next post will be hitting my FB timeline. There were also demands from my FB friends for enabling them to share my posts.
My satirical posts, besides strong anti-establishment points of view, then got interspersed with my father R Vijayaraghavan’s poems that were penned on current topics. He happened to be a big name in the prestigious Ruia College owing to his skills in writing poetry. My dad in fact showed me the college magazine in which his poems had been published. As time passed, I realized that social media is very addictive in nature and chose to limit my use of FB. I now get to hear that Facebook is getting renamed as Meta. Interestingly, I just keep wondering whether the friends I have earned over the years on FB will ever get to meet me face to face at a point of time in the future.
