Tag Archives: Facebook

My life’s journey from village India, to Facebook

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This is a carry over from my previous post, on connecting dots.

They say, writers get writer’s block, where they go into a phase when they cannot seem to write even a sentence. Well, I am not a professional writer, thankfully. But I often get into the opposite of a writers block. Too many different ideas, opinions and views crowd into me when I start writig. They jostle with eath other for my attention. One wants me to move this way, and write up about this issue. Another tugs me the oppsite way, reminding me not to ignore something else. I am being pulled in many directions to write about many different things that, together, helps connect the dots. Was I always like this? I know I was always full of questions and used to drive everybody nuts. Anyhow, now that I am busy connecting the dots, too many views crowd into my head and I try the filter through them to chose what I would write first and what next. In the process I end up explaining myself and my life as part of the story. Perhaps my life can help explain why I think the way I do. And by my life, I mean both the place and time that influenced my growing years, and the genes that I share with my parents and my siblings. Both my siblings – my younger brother and my elder sister, are no more. I am all alone on earth right now.
But the urge to write continues … since this is such a complex world today, with so many dots moving in so many directions in so many different speeds in three dimension. My writers anti-block keeps pulling me differnt ways. Some of them pulls me to analyse how I grew up to be influenced by how many different things in how many ways, to have a mind set that makes me want to connect the current dots and to make sense. I never before had this feeling that the world is moving ever faster towards a combination of multiple kinds of doom.

Am I going nuts as a sign of senility creeping up or is this rational thinking that the world as we know it is going to vanish suddenly and that 21st century doomsday is nearly upon us, hanging like the sword of Damocles?
I know the world medical ssytem has been working for multiple generatiosn now, slowly, to begin a system to make kankind sick for their entire lives, so everyone is a lifelong customer for the medical idustry. I know the new age moden agriculture is likewise trying to make agriculture dependent on acrocorporation products that makes our food sick, so we are permanently dependent on these industriess in order to eat. So our food and our health, has already been captured. What else is left. Well, there is about wealth. And finally, there is the planet, with everything on it.
Am I delusional or am I being rational? I have the data to claim most of my suspicions.

But let us first go back to how I grew up, as one of the factors that influence my dot-plotting.

Thats me, two years old, and my year older sister. Far as I know, this is my earliest picture that has survived. My opinion and world view started being formed from this time.

Back to Facebook.

Odd as it may sound, I am now looking back at my life and same time being pulled towards toying with the idea of comparing our 22nd century mega social giants, such as Facebook and Google, as Black holes in our society and our subconscious. They are physically invisible, and yet, they are like an invisible parallel world that have gotten inside our psyche, and playing with our brains to shape the way we think. They are way more powerful than any drug or pill or jab invented by Big Pharma and they are eating our humanity from inside out.

It is a supergiant thingamajig that you can never see nor photograph nor visit, but is so huge that it literally bends, curves and convolutes the space around it and in a way defines our universe. Whether we can identify it, or not, is the thing. Today, I have come to the cross road where I wonder how my life’s journey took me from village India, to Facebook and how I now toy with the idea of comparing it with a Black Hole. But, how are we influenced by our movement through flow of the stream that we call life on earth?

Self went to inspect a ship in Hong Kong harbour in the 1990s,. I am standing between the British Captain and his wife. The captain was a friend, who asked me to bring my wife alone, so I did. She is standing next to the captain.

From those days and even earlier, from books we read, village drama we see at night on stage, or the chanting of religious or seasonal festivals – we have always been influeced by what we see and hear, to form out public opinion.

Public perception of life was being controlled by private enterprise for a while. Two generations ago, people use to say about Hollywood – There is no business like show business.

I remember the the details of first movie that I saw, in Kolkata, India, with my mother. It was a bengali movie, the title would translate as “Song of the road”. It was from 1955. It got a whole slew of national and international rewards and literally launched Indian cinema on the world stage, winning award after award across the planet, except in Hollywood. But decades later, its director, Satyajit Ray, in his last days on his death bed, earned a long distance lifetime achievement award by American motion picture award ceremony in Hollywood. The picture was a tale of the views around his world from the eyes of a very young kid, barely five or six year old, living in a very small village in an abjedtly poor (in comparison with the rest of the world) rural family. The family was leaving their ancestral village since they lost their mudhouse home. All their belongings were packed, occupying half of a single small bullock cart. The other half was the sleeping quarter for the father, mother and the boy. They finally came along a railway track. The boy had never seen a rail line or a train. He vividly recalls his dead elder sister, who had once asked if someone could please take her to see a train.

The movie – Song of the Road, in Bengali, was the first movie that I remember seeing, possibly at the age of six, that my mother took me to see. This movie left a vivid effect on it, till today.

Even today, as I remember how my mother held my hand and took me to the cinema hall, and how I gawked at the giant screen as the movie played out. I was myself perhaps six years old. I am now going to be 73 in a few months. Even today, the memory of it raises the hairs in my arms, the experience was so vivid and touching.

Santiniketan, India. This is where I was born, and attended school barefeet

Thus, my own world view has emerged and evolved with events throughout my life. The fact that I went through my school years withuot footwear, fact there I lived in a place where there were no junk on the street, when plastic was not invented and everything was naturally biodegradable, that my feet had little other than dust when I ame home, fact that we all had to wash our feet before entering – every bit of it influenced my world view as I grew up. I understand my views were markedly different from boys that grew up in cities in India. One could not and did not live the way I did. Nobody completes schools in cities without footwear. Even homelss street beggars have footwear.

But I was not quite poor, per say. Our expenses where way lower. The family income was way lower than in cities. We had no ceiling fan inside home. IN the heat of the summer when sleeping inside was a torture, we slept out in the open in our frant lawn. If it suddenly started raining at night, and Indian monsoon can be torrential, we woudl wake up, take our mattress, pillows and mosquitto net and run indoors. That was all very normal. Your life was in sync with nature. ANd I never got cold, or malaria, or any illness because of living close to nature.

This is how my life’s journey took me from Village India, to Facebook

Birbhum district, West Bengal, India – from days that are behind us now, but it was real when I was a kid.

That picture describes my neighbourhood surrrounding our small University townlet of Santiniketan in Bengal, India. Homes where mud walled. Roofs were of straw. Transport was on bullock cartsm made of bamboo, Wheels were at first wooden. But steel rims around fooden wheels made inside the village was entering the fray. And then wholly steel wheels, without tire, was the next step of self sustainability, where the money stayed in the village and did not go to city corporations and factories far away. Sustainability was not just a catch phrase. It was real and omnipresent. That was part of the essence of my childhood. But all that was already changing and at a breakneck speed. I did not realise it then, but my world was being put upside down, little by little, till it comes into multiple crisis at the same time.

I did not know it then, but the agents of such change, the horses of apocalypse, were both the rich and the poor, the left and the right, the corporations and the politicial parties. I did not know it till I was well into my senior years. I thought I knew much of the world when I was a teen and a post teen. But I can now say – I knew only the surface ripples of a very vast and deep system.

Me in the middle with my siblings. My younger brother at left and my elder sistem, wearing colour, at right. It was at the Santiniketan version of the Holi festival, of Vasanta Utsav, which translates as Spring Festival. Today I am the only one alive.

Fast forward a tumultuous phase of decade after decade of growing up, studying and epansion of our horizon, for good and bad, till I ended up living in Hong Kong just before the turn of the millennia and internet came to the world. Hong Kong was very advanced compared in the early and mid 1990s, to most western regions, and dial up internet came to my home, when Apple computers, Macintoshes, were ahead of the Microsoft PCs to embrace internet and recognise it as what it was soon going to be. Bill Gates caught on soon enough and made a total about turn, covertig the entire PC industry into an internet promoting enterprise.

Soon I was to leave Hong Kong, as the free wheeling and near tax free British Colony was going to be handed over to Communist China and there was fear that the place was going to change and non-chinese people might be kicked out. A huge exodus started out of Hong Kong. Industries, banks and people started moving out. Head hunters from around the world set up offices and channels to catch entrepreneurs, skilled people and industries, to help them resettle in various parts of the west. Kiosks, fairs and shows started coming up in Parks on weekends in Hong Kong, from various such sources. Even the Governments of Canada and USA were organising picnics, shows and taking up Booths in cultural fairs, to attract potential immigrants. It was quite a show. I had not decided to leave initially, but eventually I too got swept in the tide, when a ship owning firm in Miami, Florida, gave me a call and offered me a 7 days free of charge vacation to Miami, if I agree to an interview by the CEO, for a potential job as an executive. No kidding.

And my life changed. However, I was alreay well into the internet, thanks to Hong Kong. I even managed to change my own web page and sight, with a new account from a service provider in Miami, paying for it with my newly acquired credit card linked to a Hong Kong bank, and shifted my web home page there, with a hotlink to my existing Hong Kong based web page. It was all very exciting those days and I was pleased that I could do all that with relative ease, while most of my friends still did not much know what the heck internet was.

Fast forward a few decades and I was then in Canada and first got interest in a host of new social media platforms cropping up everywhere. Facebook was one of them. There were many others and the competition was fierce. Internet connection was by then moved on from telephone dial in, to broadband, in the US where I lived for some years, to Canada, where I migrated to. I have forgotten some of the other platforms, but eventually estabished myself on Facebook, primarily as it was here that I could communicate with the townspeople from my birth place – Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. There it was still dial up, but local system providers where getting busy hooking people up with dial up modems etc. I think broadband lines were still into the future. Those were the heady days.

Today, I have almost nobody in my home town that communicate with me. Many have passed away. Others have drifted away. Some have separated frm me on ideological differences.

Tagore

You see, internet has been, same time, a great uniter and a great divider. WHen you do not get to hear or read too much from your friends, do you not know too much of his or her world views and ideological bend. So friendship remains stable, though superficial. As internet broadens the communication channels and people spend more time expressing themselves, sometimes fissures come up. For me, life has been a great educator, and I have always had an open and questioning mind, not anchored on any ideology. Nothing was ever written in stone for me. Not religion, not phylosophy, not political affiliation – not nothing. Everything was worth exploring, worth admiring for its good points and criticising for what I considered its bad points. I was perhaps more influenced by my genes, my parents and the only person who greatly influenced my world view – Tagore.

So, I was once a socialist, then a progressive, a liberal, a secularist, then an ism-less humanist, then promoter of small entrepreneurs (I even started a trading company myself in Hong Kong, before realising I was not a businessman at heart, and closed it down after a few years, but not before I had made a few thousand bucks, involved in breaking of ships in western India, through links in Hong Kong, and paid in US dollars). But most of my birth place friends were anchored in stone. Eventually we fell apart.

Things have now come to a head and I have started detesting some of my friends. A young classmate from my school days, who ended up being a professon in a famous Univerity in Delhi, even psoted to me on Facebook that – I was endangerign mankind by refusing to wear a mask and hugging people everywhere and mising with them. I was such a threat to mankind that he was going to report me to the Canadian police, so I would spend my remaining days in jail, and save mankind in the process. No, he was not a mad man. He was a profession in a shiny famous University in the Capital city of India. So much for professors. Suffice it to say, I had by then learned how to block people.

So, my link with the leftist, or left leaning crowd of my own past, drifted apart from me. I myself, through life experiences had leared that some people were too block headed for my taste and childhood friendship was not enough to stay in touch if I was not allowed to speak my mind of items that I thought were ruining the planet, and that neither the left wing, nor the right wing, were honest or path finders.

Eventually, rather late in life, I began to understand how social media like Facebook, Google search and other stuff, where actively engaged in altering public opinion of the entire planet, and have more power to control people, than national governments, and how they were seriously trifling with free flow of information and exploration of the mind.

I have also been aware how some of these corporations have acquired unebelievable power over the people, though mind control, or through stifling opposition, and by having enough money to buy up governments, of not just small countries. There is now a famous joke in America – USA is the best governemnt in the world that money can buy.

And so I engaged in a multiple year effort to get away from, and wean people I like, away from the clutches of Facebook. I have mostly failed in my effort. But that is okay with me. It is not so much the result, but the effort, that makes life worth living, for me. Besides I have largely been a lone ranger in my activism that stretches decades well into my teen years in India. I have rarely ben happy joining any big group, for all sorts of reasons. Mostly I found these group leaders, including political leaders, lacking in ethics and for being in it more for themselves, than for any root social issue.

MeWe was another example of my failed efforts. It looks and behaves similar to facebook. In my judgment, opening a second house on MeWe should be least painful for Facebookians. I tried my best to enourage people to move there. Why? Because Facebook seriously and viciously restricts free speech when it comes to certain burnig topics of the world today, and MeWe does not. That alone should be enough for people that are aware of it and are actually engaged day and night criticising Facebook and Zuckerberg, to move there. But I failed in my effort. I now know more about the Artificial Intelligence tools that Zucherberg uses to keep people hooked and unable to leave FB. I admire Zuckerberg for his smartness and detest him for his efforts to guide and shape global public opinion.

But, Zuckerberg is not the guy I have to live with. I am that guy I have to live with. So, my effort on MeWe, as well as others, continue. I have succssfully boycotted Youtube without cancelling my unpaid membership. I have largely transported by recent stuff out of Facebook and on to other channels and platforms. MeWe is one of them. And here is what I have to show for it.

I have only a few hundred friends, who almost never respond or comment on any of my posts, and never generate any conversation that can amount to a conversation.

Do I get that in Facebook ? Not quite. If you have 5,000 friends, over 10,000 followers and another thousand wanting to be my friends – thats a total of 16,000 or so. And then I get less than one meaningful conversation a day on life altering events going on around the world. Sure, lots of folks are busy making small protests nearby on some of these issues. But I can see that virtual protets on the same Facebook that is cleverly engaged in controlling public opinion and acting as a super controlled-Opposition promoter.

But facebook too has been an useful tool for me in my last years. it is a reasonable rough diary, to hone my writing skills. this helps my brain to remain active. Brain is after all the largest and most fuel consuming organ of the body. exercising the brain as as strenuous as running several rounds around my block, but for keeoing differnt parts of my body healthy.

I have always been reasonably healthy. I do not take any jab – not in last 65 years. I never get an infection. My medical bill has been zero for the lat forty or more years. And, thankfully, my brain is still active and my fingers are still nimble enough for me to be baning keyboards to try my writing skills.

Examples of my failed attemps on Facebook to find answers and develop a dialog. I did not know, even three years ago, that Facebook was exactly the wrong platform for this.

So, MeWe and the rest are not necessarily examples of my failure. I have often, and repeatedly, failed in my efforts to engage socially about issues that matter to us socially. But for me, these failed activities were still memorable. These are proofs of an active mind that does not like to give up easily. And I have found a good use for Facebook – a rough diary.

Here is how similar my home page on MeWe looks like my FB page. I think I need to change my profile picture. I instinctively dislike hiding myself behind phony nakes or pictures while socialising. And I like the idea of wrapping text around my picture to express my opinion. I was born opinionated.

Tony’s Covid Corner

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I have had a comfortable existence on Facebook, the king of the social media platforms so far for a dozen years or so. But like all things, it has gone past the peak for me and the attraction is ebbing. More importantly, I am outraged at how Facebook actively censors public opinion to push the Covid agenda and fear mongering on one side, push unwanted and hated commercials down our throat, and how it bans public officials, including the president of the US, because they do not confirm to their own political agenda.

Facebook has become the face of the denigration of US institutions – free speech being one of them.

I understand how this works for Zuckerberg. With 2.7 billion users, he has monopoly and near absolute power. He has reportedly used computer based artificial intelligence tools to keep people more or less addicted to this platform. And like all addicts, they will stick to their provider of drugs even when they know they are being manipulated.

In other words, Facebook abuses its power to control and shape public opinion. When it comes to covid, it makes sure everybody is scared out of their wits about it, and falling over backward to take whatever tools are doled out by the system. This is in line with most government versions, as many believe, the governments themselves are in the pocket of the New World Order Deep state, and Facebook, along with other big techs like google, apple, amazon – are part of that Deep State.

No, this is no more a conspiracy theory. When conspiracy becomes a fact, then it is no more a theory.

Anyhow, to come back to my original thoughts, I decided getting away from Facebook, just to deny Zuckerberg my own existence to make money on and control. This was easier said that done though.

There were many issues involved with Facebook, even among my own social media circle. For a start, I had nearly 5,000 friends and around 2,000 followers, or some seven thousand people in contact. I would have to leave all of them once I left Facebook. Did I owe them an explanation, or have a dialog to discuss my decision? Well, I thought I would give them a chance to find me elsewhere and either follow me or not, they could then decide.

I have been involved in different ways, protesting the covid narrative and the extreme lockdown and psychological terror being reigned upon the people on earth, keeping them terrified about an invisible virus. Eventually, my friends circle divided into two groups. The earlier contacts – mostly from folks I personally knew and met in the past, by and large felll into the group that are afraid of covid, and falling over each other in wearing a mask and waiting for a vaccine etc. I felt myself more and more out of place there, since my common sense, scientific curiosity and unwillingness to take official verdicts without question, made me a pariah among my original friends. Clearly, I belonged to a different wave length. Subsequently, my contact with the old guard faded, and I made a lots of new friends that knew of me through my activism, my protests, my letters and meetings with elected officials, from my posts, blogs, videos and through my world view. Although they were new, they understood me better and I could align myself with them since we both shared an important common ground – we applied common sense on whatever we saw and heard. We were unwilling to accept what politicians, the TV and Big Tech, or Big Pharma were saying at face value.

I also came from a background of long term activism and doing much of what I did single handedly rather than with a crowd. I was for example, very keen to refocus attention on the lowest rung of our governments, the municipal government – on tax revolt. Idea was simple and did not touch the controversial issue of if covid is real or not. My proposal was, since the economy was reeling due to covid restrictions, everybody was feeling the pinch and tightening the belt. So should the municipality. But property tax was going high instead of being reduced proportionate to the fall in economic activity.

I thought most folks will go along with that. And once we gather strength, one could ask if members are happy to also demand that the municipality either provides its own proof, or demands proof from provincial or federal governments that the selective lockdowns of “non-essentials” do actually stop spread of a virus and that we are actually, in the middle of a genuine life threatening pandemic and not just sponsored fear mongering.

All that was actual boots-on-the-ground activism that I liked, instead of sitting on the virtual media fence and pontificating like a bunch of armchair activists. At first, there was some interest and common ground. We even took pictures and had a preliminary meeting. But it did not go beyond that. The effort was first sabotaged by the Unifythepeople group, and then the rest sort of started splintering on other issues and the whole protest scene started looking more like controlled opposition to me.

This has happened to me in the past often enough during my glyphosate and GMO protesting days, and I knew what controlled opposition meant.

So, combining the facts that

  • Facebook was abusing its power and protest groups within it were, knowingly or unknowingly, Controlled Opposition,
  • There was a need to go outside of Facebook to be free of censorship and manipulation.
  • There was also a need to go to more direct activism
  • There was a dire need to brainstorm and think through strategies
  • We face a global problem that needed protest groups to find a way to join hands instead of remain as isolated rabbit holes.

I thought of creating a new group outside of Facebook but inside of virtual social media, to attract like minded people, a small group, to essentially brainstorm and look for solutions and paths towards things to do on the ground.

Same time, I also had moved from YouTube to BitChute and closed my WhatsApp account, and reduced my footprint on Facebook and twitter. My online behaviour was undergoing a fundamental change.

Has that effort worked?

Well, not exactly, but a start has been made.

How green was my Facebook

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I read the book ‘How green was my valley’ three times. The first time, I was in school in Santiniketan. I was mesmerized by the warm hearted and bittersweet story about a Welsh coal mining village of the 1930s by Richard Llewellyn. I was not as familiar with English then. I did my schooling in my mother tongue. And yet, I liked that book a lot because it had made me think. I remember talking about it with my elder sister, who had not read it at the time. After I spoke about it, she too read it. I remember that I was impressed by the Welsh names in that book.

How green was my valley – the movie

I remember how the main character of the book, Huw, would go to his sister in law Bronwen for advise. He loved the gentle character of Bronwen. I used to play around with that name, rolling it in my tongue and imagining how the Welsh  pronounced that name, so it would sound feminine instead of masculine. She vaguely even reminded me of the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore, and his sister-in-law Kadambari devi. I was just catching up those days, about the early years of Rabi, in JoraSanko, and often drew parallels between sets of information that floated my way. So, I tried drawing a comparison, however absurd it might seem, between Bronwen of the novel, from a welsh coal mining village, and the real life character of Kadambari Devi of Jorasanko, Kolkata, before she committed suicide.

How green was my valley – the book

Apart from the Welsh names, I got a glimpse of the now vanished life and times in a coal mining village in the western hemisphere. As I grew up, I came to associate that atmosphere in rotation with other regions of the world. It related to the mining towns in Soviet Russia and then to China and on to Africa, particularly southern Africa. And, in the name of progress, a version of it has come to India, with typical Indian versions of the political, social and ecological nastiness.
But, do we have a writer of the same caliber as Richard Llewelyn – someone that can write a book that can be the ‘How green was my valley’ equivalent in India?

I remember reading ‘Gone with the wind’ in school, with its social upheaval relating to a civil war and end of slavery in the US, and immediately connecting it with “Saheb Bibi Golam’ of the vanishing days of Zamindary in eastern India, on the last decade of the 19th century. The Indian story lacked the civil war and the social upheaval. The transition did not perhaps affect the common man too much. But the lazy and oppulent, wasteful life of the fading Zamindars reminded me somehow, with the fast vanishing life of the vain and pompous Southern Plantation owners of the American south. In India, the old lifestyle of people being born into wealth because they agreed to tax the residents for the benefit of the Raja, the Nawab or the British, were soon to disappear. They were to be replaced by a new breed to people that got license to do business by greasing the right palms. Ultimately, the coin was replacing the sword. But then, the coin had always employed the sword.

Saheb Bibi Golam – by Bimal Mitra

But – I did not find a book comparable to ‘How green was my valley’ with regard to the life and times of miners in India and their families, and expanding that, the general degradation of the land that such mining invariably involved. Even Llewellyn’s book did not touch that issue. Ecological degradation of the landscape was not in people’s radar in the 1930s. It should have been. Had they been conscious about it then, we might not be in the state we are in now. But, I am digressing.

My time in Facebook is going to taper down. The first thing that came to mind while writing about it – was How green was my Facebook. Somehow, I subconsciously connected  my departure from Facebook with the main character’s departure from his mining village in that book I read first in my childhood days. And just like the valley, Facebook turned out to be full of fond memories as well as wasteful and sad. That similarity resulted in me rambling for a few pages about that book, about Welsh names, and about mining. And now, I have finally arrived at the root – Facebook and the fact that I need to move on.
Facebook had been a wonderful place when I first got used to it. It was novel, it was like a virtual Kalor Dokan, or a virtual tea stall. Folks from different parts of the world would sit down and yap a little, exchange views and even show off a bit. Every one has a laugh, and then we go home to deal with real life.
And what is real life ?

I have pondered that question, but have not found a reasonable definition. Some would think my real life should be the time spent in the working hours of weekdays, when I am an engineer working for my employer. But I don’t think of that as my real life at all.
Some might consider the time they spend at home with their family as real life. I am tempted to agree with them, but am not sure.
To some, real life is the weekends when they can go and do things that they really love to – such as skiing, or watching soccer, or playing badminton, or, for me, wandering about the foothills of mountains nearby, just watching the scenery, or focusing on birds and clicking their pictures. I just realized I take approximately five hundred times more pictures of landscapes, birds and animals, than I do of humans. This has been the case ever since I got my first good camera, thirty years ago.

So, what is real life? Is it about humans, or birds, or mountains and rivers, or what ?
Whatever it is – it is not Facebook. But, for a long time, it provided an interesting parallel. Man is after all, a social animal Thats what sets us apart. We socialize, we communicate, we exchange views – because we are human.

It was nice to get back in touch with long lost acquaintances. Those were the heady days. At the back of my mind, there was also the wish that we needed to do something with our spare time that related to some form of community work – to give back to the system from which we have taken so much. This ‘system’ could be the school we studied in, the region or the people that we develop an attachment for, or the neighborhood where we live, the wider world, the nature, wildlife – whatever we feel obligated to for making us what we are. Its a token of appreciation and an effort to see that the ‘system’ will survive and thrive after we ourselves are gone. Humans developed not only communication skills, but also the notion of altruism. No?

It came from the general and fundamental understanding that systems need support, and the best support is one that comes from bottom up, rather than top down from the Government or politicians. It may be a wrong perception – but that was my perception and it stayed with me over the years.

Anyhow, Facebook, along with bulletin boards, blogs and such, became also an avenue to see if we could do something to support the vision of Tagore. Subconsciously, FB became a vehicle of sorts. But that was then, and I was more hopeful than wise.
It also became a vehicle of creative outlet. I doubt I would have penned as many cranky verses, “ছড়া”, as I eventually wrote, had it not been for Facebook. But, that was then, too.
Somewhere down the line, Facebook became just a thing one gets used to, and perhaps a bit hooked too as well – like a cup of coffee in the morning. It gets addictive.
We made many good friends through FB. But, along with that, we also accumulated junk. We saw more junk, we processed more junk, and we created more junk. By junk, I mean instantaneous flash in the pan that lasts a day, two days, or a week, but after that becomes part of the rising tide of background noise. This background tide of noise can, eventually, become deafening. I needed to get away, and look at it from another perspective. I needed to turn the volume down. I needed social ear plugs.

I had too many acquaintances on Facebook – way more than my brain or my time could reasonably deal with on a personal one to one level. So the question came, do I need the notion of having so many friends that I shall perhaps never exchange anything personal with? Do I need five or six people to like what I write so much, that I must advertise my thoughts and deeds to hundreds of people?
Our past is a great thing to remember. But there is one thing about the past – it is in the past. Not all things from the past will survive. I shall always have close and dear ones from the past – but, I should not need five hundred silent friends on Facebook just to keep in touch with a half dozen. There surely should be a better way.

Facebook is less green today. It is turning brown at the edges. Its details are beginning to fade. Also, as I get older, I find this platform more for the youngsters that have the time in their hand, and the interest in small items of their daily life. For them, it is perhaps the essence of catching up with the community. For me, it increasingly looks like a barrage of trivia that I do not want to know.

But, I cannot leave Facebook completely, just like Richard Llewellyn the writer could not quite leave his Welsh homeland, even as the main character prepared to leave that land for good.
Facebook, like the google forum on Santiniketan, like the “Santiniketaner Khata” blog I used to run, or the Uttarayan bulletin board, just like the podcast – they will remain fond memories and we shall retain contact with it, albeit from a distance. Distance is not bad per se. It shows us perspective. Distance is three dimensional.

I am not leaving it completely also because there are folks on this platform that I value, and who I would like to continue interacting with in future.

Somnath Mukherjee – for his sheer dedication and selflessness in community service towards the downtrodden Indians, and for being such an inspirational person.
Madhusree Mukherjee – for reminding me that taking up science as a profession should not make one uncaring about civic society and ecology.
Felix Padel – for reminding me that even trained economists can be caring ecologists.
Tathagata Sengupta – for being a smaller version of Somnath and growing up to equal him.

Edward Lee Durgan – for joining up with us for “Free Binayak Sen” March, after listening to me just for a half hour about Sen, and for his world view and firm commitment to principles that are so rare to find these days.

Ashley Zarbatany of Social Justice Group of the University of British Columbia – the second person that joined up on the Free Binayak Sen March in Vancvouer, who took the mike and spoke to the crowd. Although I have not had much interaction with her, I have watched her involvement with more issues of social justice. Folks like her help keep my faith in humanity alive.

Susan Bibbs of downtown Vancouver. She showed me what it meant to be a bleeding heart liberal of British Columbia – ha ha.

Ashie Hirji, the Ismaili rebel that read the Veda and practiced yoga, the entrepreneur, feminist, social reformer, secular and whacky, of downtown Vancouver of the past  and of Europe of present – for just being herself.

Subin Das – because I was once with him in college, because he know and spent time with my father when I was half a world away, and because of his perception of the world.

Pradip Malhotra – as the only person I know and spoke with on phone while he spent months on the Antarctic, not to mention being a great guy.

Lokendranath Roychowdhury – for being so intelligent, articulate and observant.
Chira, Barsan, Sujoy, Sandeep and others who, like Madhusree, live in the west, are from cutting edge Science and yet do such a wonderful job of maintaining social awareness, and compassion for the world. You may not know it, but you all have influenced my views on the balance between technological progression and regression, and the balancing acts between new versus old and good versus bad. I hope to find some of you in google + too.

Bhaiya, Kukul, Tukul, Moni and so many others – for being my relatives and friends – who I shared my past with, and hope to share part of my future with too.
Tapas da, Tukul, Piyali – the trio that, along with me, formed at one time the quadrangle of Santiniketan ex-students that existed on conference calls, on Facebook, on Uttarayan, and physically in Santiniketan as well as even here in Canada when some of them would come to visit. I shall always remember the great time we had, speaking with each other and rattling off. I even have recordings of most of it.

Then there are my many friends from Santiniketan – that I share a great memory with.
Ravi Dwivedi – because of the size of the lens on his avatar – ha ha.

And then there is Debal Deb, one of the few that stand tall in my view for wanting to buck the trend of globalized and corporatist food industry where indigenous strains of food are to be destroyed and replaced by genetically modified and patented food that will feed those that can afford to pay, and same time enrich the patent holder, and where the hungry will no more have the choice in selecting what kind of food he likes to eat. He, Vandana Shiva and others like them that defy the corporate Goliath and their cohorts in the Governments and decide to preserve indigenous seeds when no one else will – so a small slice of our biodiversity may still survive the onslaught of “economic progress”. But, he is moving out of Facebook and on to google+. So he did not really deserve a mention here. But then, I am a human and not a computer. I make mistakes.

All my local friends from Greater Vancouver area.
And many many others that I came across.
My thanks to you all .. You will see me here, but not that often.

I shall be more present in google+ as a social network site. Its easier for me to find folks and events that I like to keep track of. But even there, my presence may not be high. Any of you that have a gmail account can find me there. I am not even sure if it requires a gmail address. Anyhow, mine is tony.mitra@gmail.com

Other than that, any important message that is just for me – pls send an email. I tend to ignore mass emails since there are so many that come my way. An interesting statistics of the quality of our communication against quantity – out of 100 emails in my inbox, usually there are only two that are directly addressed to me by someone I know. The rest – are just floating debris.

Those that have an interest in catching up on my random thoughts and musings and creative writings, – well, there used to be bulletin boards, multiple blogs as well as podcasts, each carrying volumes of stuff written and talked over the past so many years. But I am winding them all down.

I shall only concentrate on one site, and write only what pleases me, irrespective of if it pleases readers. I do not aim to make money out of it and so I do not need to follow convention and formula. You can find that in www.tonu.org.

And so, here I am, starting with how I first read the book ‘How green was my valley’ and ending here, on a blog, writing how green my Facebook was.

Be good, everyone.

It was nice.