broad-banded!!!

Life on campus is not the same anymore, gone are the days when the café (euphemism for thattukada ) used to be the sole place were gossip mushroomed and mischief planners thrived. With the internet came the age of IMs (Instant Messaging), and such new terms as emoticon and smiley have become the cliché of the day. This is the age of Web logs (blogs) , homepages and web groups. There is hardly anyone on campus who doesn’t have or isn’t part of anyone of these. The wide majority are comfortably proud to be affiliated with all of these.

The folks at College of Engineering Trivandrum are no exception to this galactic( I choose to use the word, living in the cyber age…….who can say if aliens aren’t part of the internet) phenomenon. There is hardly a day that goes by without “Did you get my offlines? , “ I’ve posted those pictures on the group “, “Did you read what she wrote on her blog?” …… and such seemingly silly conversation. One does wonder if these youngsters( and that includes ,yours truly) have changed to “techno – social “ beings.

For one thing, this technological charade should be commented in that it makes people more sociable, at least in an impersonal way. Keeping in touch has never been anymore easier. Well, stories of “falling in love” online are not scarce on campus, where they “fall” is food for thought though. I can’t vouch for others, but it did improve the mundane social life of this post-graduate student on campus . The life of a PG student is drab, though I don’t want to crib about it now. It was during Christmas 2005 that I was introduced to Orkut the social networking website from google. At first it wasn’t any interesting, until I discovered this CET group in there. All I did was message people one by one, and did I tell you I had my blog address on my profile, well anyway, my blog became a hotspot. I made new friends and suddenly from the puny guy from Business administration department, I became the short, sweet, smart kid around. People started to ‘recognise’ me. I was popular again!

Oh! Boy, the subtle vagaries of life. I’m dazzled. I’m speechless. I’m being googled, I’ve been Broad-banded!!!


Thomas Cris Sarasam
College of Engineering Trivandrum
http://raiderknight.blogspot.com