One Grain Amongst the Storm

“Flaming (also known as bashing) is hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users”

-Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

Recently, one of the myriads of non-descript crevices I keep drifting in on the net, ‘officially’ charged me with ‘flaming’ for a rather mundane discussion on competing models of Nikon and Canon cameras. Funnily though, the Original Poster of the thread was rather thankful to me about the suggestions I’d made. I was amused and perturbed at the same time as I’ve been a netizen since the text-only days of the Internet and I take pride in my netiquette. All along, I have carefully chosen my words, syntax and ideas, and thought twice before hitting the Post button. I am sure most folks will be hard put to recollect a single instance where I may have rubbed a co-participant the wrong way, leave alone ‘flaming’.

Now, those who know me well will tell you how impassioned I may get while defending my beliefs.  One of my seasoned friends and a senior tirelessly exhorts me against the hamartia. However, even he would admit that it takes some knocking to get me worked up and start spewing flames on the adversary. The source of consternation in the aforesaid incident, therefore, was neither the absurdity of the charge leveled against me, nor the absence or presence of worth in the models of certain brand, but the unwritten ‘rules of the forum’ which implied that the participants, lowly beings that they were, dare not raise an eyebrow to the cloths of the Emperor, a.k.a. the Administrator. And since the Emperor chanced to be the owner of certain brand of photographic equipment, anyone found even breathing against it would be charged with Capital Crime!

Since the summons had arrived in a private message, and it was condescendingly pointed out to me too, I offered that the proceedings be held in open court, in full public view of the participants of the forum. The appeal vanished as soon as it was posted, quite like my earlier ‘flaming’ expressions. Frustrated, I posted a ‘Goodbye’ message for the benefit of the odd sympathiser, who I believed had a right to the knowledge of my impending future disappearance. This also vanished as if charmed!

Well, the moral of the story is that while in the dingier sections of the fishmarket, you not only have to love the Administrator’s Dog, but the entire present, past and the future clan of the Dog! Fortunately,  few keystrokes away from the vain fiefdoms, I can surrender myself to the grace of communities like Photo.net. And although I have no plans of embracing silence anytime soon, words from an old poem by T. S. Eliot well up in my mind from nowhere:

Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning

Death

Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning

Death

Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning

Death

Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning

Death

Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,

A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog

By this grace dissolved in place…. 

I am no tiger in the woods. Forget tigers, I am not even a coyote in the woods! Yet, what exactly were the Internet sharks thinking when they stole my non-descript website url uspandey.com a year back? That I’d be running to them with two rucksacks of gold, one in each arm? Maybe Tiger Woods would do that if it saves his marriage. Certainly not me for a string of symbols, or worse still, for a string of zeroes and ones!

But the Internet is deeper than you think and the potent mafia is closer to you than you can imagine. Just to give you an idea, and sorry if you feel uncomfortable, every fetch and send to your bank account rubs shoulders with an infinity of cookies, trojans, worms and malwares. What I am driving at is that it didn’t take them long to figure I am broke and that, I probably will have to sell my kidneys to buy a decent pair of Nikkor lenses for my DSLR that I’ve been pining for! And they dumped me on the beach with the rest of the silt and probably carried a prize catch or two away. I, of course, mean the website url by ‘me’.

No, it doesn’t end there. The Net is bristling with smalltime crooks and fraudsters of every imaginable hue. I specially love the kinds who disclose how you just won a lottery of $1,000,000,000 and how a bunch of shameless customs officials are holding the booty for a mere $1! They take over where the Sharks quit.

So I get this mail from best-domains-on-earth or some bullshit.com telling me they will be selling my favourite domain in an auction soon. However, they say, if I pay certain $$$s it would be mine again. Déjà vu. I almost hit the delete button when I notice it is not the same outfit from down under which approached me the last winter. You know what, curiosity killed the cat! So instead of brushing it off but thinking about it the entire week, I did a ‘whois’ for the lost url. Surprisingly, it was lying there, as I said, dumped on the beach with the rest of the silt, unregistered with anyone. This cat wanted a ransom for the fish he never was in possession of! Before I realized, my fingers had fished out that nemesis of my life, a.k.a. the credit card, from my pocket and I had booked the domain again for a mere $5! I am hard put to put it to some use but at least it will not be misused or hawked around the stinking alleys of Internet. The clock, of course, has come a full circle.

Years ago when the doomsayers were busy swearing that every computer on this earth will pop away into fine ionic dust come Y2K, my stoic scientist friend wouldn’t even bat an eyelid. He suggested I get a webaddress instead, long live the computers. A lesser mortal that I was, I still had to unravel the mysteries of ‘Shell’ vs. TCP/IP accounts, which I’ll never be able to come to terms with anyway.

Y2K came and went without causing any serious dent to the credibility of computers. Encouraged, I wrote a webpage of my own on Geocities one day and went around the town telling everyone about it. Hundreds of emails shot off my outbox. My friend’s countenance bore a knowing smile. But I wanted to be happier. I wanted to be more professional. I bought a domain which added dot com right next to my name. uspandey.com.

One day I got an innocuous looking mail from Mr. Shylock. It said I needed to pay double the amount of registration for a renewal. I paid. The message was repeated the next year and the next. I was crestfallen. I grit my teeth and let go the dot com extension.

I have moved to dot net since and “yet God has not said aword”. But I am amused at the ways of the Shylocks of Cyberworld. The dot com is doing the rounds with different squatters who are all trying to sell it back to me for hundreds of dollars! Little do they know how bitterly I hated the name given to me by parents once! Thanks for taking it away, ladies and gentlemen! Wish you had purchased all possible extensions so that I could have started totally afresh.

(Post moved from my other blog)