Getting back in touch with my lost friends
Filed Under (People) by Rajesh Kumar on 30-07-2008
I have been a net freak for quite a while now and don’t let go a single chance to lecture my colleagues and friends on the latest tools and sites that help us do this and do that. I use it like a machine to communicate and buy sell, blog, and occasionally leave scraps and respond to them, and poke people on Facebook. I also admire when Mark Zuckerburg rides the wave of social networking to become a billionaire, but never given a thought beyond that, my skepticism always getting better of my sense to appreciate innovative new business. The social networking thing never touched me, I mean like the way it has , in the last few weeks.
The MBA boys are fairly well connected, and most of them are a phone call away. One did not have to make much effort to create the phonebook, it somehow seems to have happened, via meetings at airports, or when visiting another city. And anyway, Gazab, Padri and Mota all love that old thing called Linkedin, where you invite and accept and then basically do nothing. And precisely how joke forwards in the old boys network can be called as connecting actually beats me.It is somehow integral to the creed to MBAs to ‘hate’ each other and still be in touch! My wife (mercifully, not an MBA, but a more real variety called PhD researcher) has been a die-hard Orkuter who keeps telling me of people she reconnected via Orkut.
Cut to late 2007. The long lost engineering gang starts to emerge. It becomes interesting to see the difference of one person could make to building this connect. Okay, make it two of them. And Tripathi is in Australia, and Binay in Bengal, working as an Indian Railways officer. After digital identities, phone numbers are ascertained, one to another, and I get to be back in touch with several of them. Call it engineering precision.Wow!
Cut to last evening.Via an Orkut scrap, Apurva Mathur, my class mate from Kendriya Vidyalaya , Andrewsganj, New Delhi (we like calling it KVAG) points me to a picture posted on Facebook which is our school farewell picture(Three months back I discovered Apurva Mathur when surfing KVAG community on Orkut at my wife’s insistence). I have long lost the my copy of this photo so this one gets all my attention. I try to recall the names, but Vivek Varma, my newly discovered classmate has taken the pains to list all the names. Not just that, he has tagged couple of them via their Facebook profiles. I was completely overwhelmed to see the picture yesterday. I asked Vivek for his phone number and spoke to him near midnight. We used to travel together to school in the same van, and studied in the same class for 4 years.It was quite unbelievable to hear his voice after so about 19 years. I have been day dreaming this morning and listening mentally to my classroom ruckus, which happened decades back.
Facebook and Orkut – wish your owners another billion dollars. What you have given me is treasure.
PS: What next? My kindergarten friends from Doon Cultural Centre? My early school friends from Prabhat Tara School Muzaffarpur? How will they come to be reconnected to me- via Twitter?
Couldn’t take a closer look, but looks good… Old photos are always memorable…
I am sure this photo brings back so many good memories for you! It is a great feeling to meet childhood friends..given that most of us grew up in a time when there was no email and it was easy to lose touch even with very close friends if one moved around the country.
Shrinidhi, the reason why I have posted a low-res photo is because of privacy related caution.
Lekhni, as you guessed it right, one reason I am exhilerated over this is becasue my current place of stay (Chennai) is far away from B-School (Ghaziabad), far away from my Engg college (Sindri) and far far away from all the schools I studied(Muzaffarpur, Ranchi, Delhi, Dehradun. I grew around the belief that every few years I must get uprooted from one set of friends, move to a new location and develop a new set of friends again
Hi Rajesh
It’s a pleasure when you receive a mail or a call from someone after a decade. Getting in tocuh after many years is one aspect but the key is to maintain these over coming years. Hope we all will keep it up.
Hi Rajesh,
Exactly my thoughts. The last few weeks have been special as I got back in touch with a number of people I knew a long time ago, including you.
I haven’t really been too interested in web-networking, blogging etc but my view have completely changed. I still feel that nothing beats the face-to-face meetings but you are missing something really great if you are not using the available technology to connect, re-connect with people.
Cheers,
Apoorva
Apoorva and Tripathi, echo you. Apoorva, blogging is a great medium to express and connect – take my advice and give it a try.
I started doing that in a small way at http://apoorvamathur.rediffblogs.com
Take a look
Thanks for such a touchy article ,really my heart weeps whenever I thought about my old school friends. It’s unexplainable the felling of meeting old friend’s.
I was a student at prabhat tara school and eventually emigrated to the u.k. I would love to get intouch with some of my school pals. i can remember some names as bibha singh, sandhya sondhi, tabassum, aprajita. If you remember gladys email me.