Missed Call

“Give me a missed call”, said my friend.”Ok”,i said.
Welcome to the world of missed calls.Not an Indian phenomenon anymore, missed calls were invented by the cost-conscious citizen to make use of the cellular network without paying a paisa for the call.I was amused to find a wiki on it

Top 5 reasons why i give a missed call:
1.Signaling home when i reach office in the morning and leave office in the evening
2.Waiting for a friend who has not turned up yet for a rendezvous
3.Cannot afford my outgoing call tariff (to be read ‘the called party is at a monetarily higher strata of the society’)
4.Giving my number to a person
5.Its nothing urgent and i don’t want to disturb the called party

The best part is you don’t need a mobile or a caller ID to capture the number. As long as you have defined a protocol (say the number of rings at a particular time signals a particular event ) it works fine.No matter how much the call costs come down, missed calls are here to stay

Socially Networked-How many do you have ?

Social networking seems to be the in thing these days . Everybody ,myself included, has a “profile” in one (if not more ) of these social networking sites.Orkut, Facebook, Linkedin -you name it ! Some of the things what you can do to your contacts : scrap, slap, ,poke,pimp (??) ,write on walls ….

The main theme is expanding your network. But i feel that idea is rather over-exploited because all we do is keep adding people as connections-people whom we hardly know. I know folks whose contacts list exceeds 700. Well , the point is, whats the use of adding people if you don’t know them ? Testing the ‘6 degrees of separation’ theory is definitely not a reason.

Interestingly, the ‘e-friends’ made online are higher than the friends whom you physically know. But such an online existence does raise some questions in my mind- Would you really be comfortable meeting that friend’s friend’s friend of yours in person ? Would you consult him/her for advice as you would ask your school/ college mate/colleague ? Would you invite him for your marriage ? Heck, Will you remember his details if the Orkut server is dead ?

Everything said and done, these online avatars do give people a chance to do things that they cannot in real life- a place where everyone is a King or a Queen.