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Personal Space Meets Cyber Space: Spells Disaster for Human Interaction

As I board the subway on 23rd street, clinging to my precious work tucked away in the black leather bag, the rainbow of charming, intimidating, smiling, melancholic, blithe, and even a few frowning faces greets my inconspicuous entry. White earphones, black cellphones, dark suits, blonde and brun coifs completes this indifferent smörgåsbord. But these countless pairs of eyes ignores me – they continue doing what they were engrossed in – staring at the paper, at the words dancing in the book, or just trying to somehow escape the crowd in the carriage and look beyond.

As I settle into the one empty seat and look around to study the faces that surround me, I realize that only one pair of eyes is returning my stare. A beautiful, dark, Indian pair. We exchange a brief glance as both try to compartmentalize the other in the relevant 4-letter acronym (ABCD, DCBA, or something new?). After that split second, in which both raise an eyebrow each, we go back to staring into space. I put on my earphones, and open my book – and then suddenly all the people in the carriage seem to have vanished – I am on my own.

What appeals to others about amrika disappoints me – there is too much of personal space. Back home, I have been accused of being too private a person, but here I crave for contact – aural, visual, tactile. Something. Anything.

As a writer, I search for stories in the environment around me. Here, 3 hours spent on a subway or a bus would at the most give me five minutes of a story to pen home about (unless I strike gold and witness a looting or am at the wrong end of a mugging). Back home, a similar 180 minutes would provide me with three years of words – a cards game on a well- worn brown briefcase, a discussion on the latest movers and shakers in the world of shares, soaps, and the silver screen, an eve unhappily teased, a whirlpool- like discussion on why Ganguly is better than Dravid or vice- versa, and of course the latest doings of Tulsi, or is it Pooja? All happens in a flash. Not to mention pockets, fights, and brains picked, impromptu antakshris with people one has never seen earlier, or has no hope of ever seeing again – it is all a vortex that sucks in everyone.

Here it is different – boring different – no one looks at one another. The rationalization is “people don’t have the time”. But then, time is a constraint back home also – yet everyone doesn’t have that impenetrable, invisible, this- is- my- private -space wall around them. There we all took time to make that human contact (willingly or otherwise) – of course given that there are 1.1 billion of us (and still counting), we had no choice!

And we were just not used to any privacy – be it at home, school, or office. You throw a stone and it lands on someone you know – an uncle, a friend, an old flame, a new crush, a niece, a neighbour whom we call ‘aunty’.

But the irony lies elsewhere – here we check our latest emails on blackberries while walking on the street (totally oblivious of the others around) and then go back home and get onto facebook or myspace and connect with friends (the more friends the better, the whackier the message on the wall the better) and throw sheep at them and send them cyberhugs and e-kisses. Yet we usually have no idea who our next-door neighbor is. Sometimes, we interact more with ‘a friend of a friend’ on facebook than their own parents or siblings.

And then there are the postings on the wall. Here we try so hard to build the Pink Floydish wall around us, only to find that friends, and friends of friends are posting messages on it for the entire cyberworld to see! So much for personal space.

Ok have to go now and throw some e-snowballs. Got to connect with people.

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