ORKUT - SOMETIMES IGNORANCE IS BLISS!

We all know Orkut as the harbringer of good news for all people in the world. I keep hearing from people how it has changed their lives and brought them in touch with their old forgotten friends. Let me tell you my side of it.

So let me give you some background. In school, I was a brat! And I was not the only one... I had 3 similarly "gifted" friends ... The four of us made quite a crew and got into a lot of trouble as well... Aaah those were the days!

So I joined my school's community just for the heck of it. I was quite sure that no one from my batch (we go back to the age of the dinosaurs!) would join me there. Nevertheless, I tried my luck and scrapped a few random people whose names I vaguely remembered.

Just when I was about to give up and assume that all people from my batch did not know what the internet was, one of them sent me a message! And this guy was one of us "fantastic four".... I remembered the face, which was now plumper and wiser (and he said the same thing about me, except the wise part!)

So I got about to asking what he was doing... to my surprise, this one, the brattiest one of us all, had managed to make it big in life... He had a wife, a one-year old son and was quite well settled in Florida working as a manager in a big multinational! Life had turned out really good!

I got around to asking him what happened to the other two because this was the first time in about 14 years I was speaking to ANY of them. He was hesitant at first and said he did not feel like discussing the past times! I was surprised because these were the ONLY times we had shared.

After much pestering, he finally opened up and told me what had happened. Turns out that life had not been that nice to the other two. One of them was a washed up salesman going door to door selling polishing liquid. He had made a moderate fortune by starting his own cement factory. But then he got addicted to gambling and lost about 70 lakhs of his money in about 3 months! Soon, his wife left him, taking whatever little he had left. Last my friend had heard of him was when he bumped into him on a street somewhere in Mumbai and asked him for Rs 10 to buy some biscuits and chai! He promised to contact him again, but never did.

More surprising was the fate of the fourth one. A certified uber-nerd, this guy was a whiz at computing when electronic typewriters were the "in" thing! All of us were quite sure that he would one day make a mark in his field. Turns out, we were right. He completed engineering and IIT from India, went on to do his MBA from a prestigious Ivy League university from the states and by the age of 24 had joined a software giant in the US.

On 31st December, 2004, when partying with friends in New York City, this social smoker overdosed on a fatal mix of raw cocaine and white wine and was certified DEAD at 3.20 AM on January 1st 2005!

I was devastated! I remembered he was about 2 months younger to me. When you hear of people dying of drug overdoses, you somehow never think that it could happen to someone you know. And yet, here was a 27 year old whose life was snuffed out in the prime! All his friends said that he had never done drugs till then and all he wanted to do was find out what it was all about!

All I could say was "May his soul rest in peace" and I just wish that the other one would get in touch with one of us again so that we can help him out in some way!

Orkut had gotten me my friends back -- but somehow I feel I could have lived without this information about my other two friends. I was happy just imagining that they were happy wherever they were. Now that I know, I agree - sometimes ignorance IS bliss!