1. The Virtual Love

You think you can find your love on facebook.

On an economically auspicious day of February 2004, a friend of Mark Zuckerberg came to him asking about the new girl in his class. Mark at that time was working on this "to be super addictive cyber drug" called “Facebook”. In no time the idea struck his mind, and now facebook is one of the most visited site on this planet.

The idea was ‘Relationship status’ and ‘Interested in’. He was a smart ass, so he was aware of the fact that the users of his site would mainly have two biggest issues in their life: Getting laid and finding the one. In his country, first option covered the major role. As time passed, facebook became a hunting ground for hot girls, rich boys and people whose orientations differ from most of the population- the homosexuals.

Back on August 23,2011.

She passed through the back door of School of ICT (my college) and I fell in love with her.

This is just an outline, to find out what the correct situation was at that time. We have to go in detail.

I was there with two of my friends, taking a walk beside the lake, cracking lame jokes at each other when I saw her. The back door of ICT is about fifteen meters from the lake. I was caught eying her by my friends and soon I was the topic of the jokes. To prove the Casanova like qualities in me, I boasted to my friends that it’s not a big deal for me to get her number. They challenged me and I accepted the challenge. She was with two of her friends and they were moving towards the library in the opposite direction, my friends were looking for me to complete the task I boasted about. Gathering courage, I got up. Showing no sign of worry on my face, I moved toward the girls who were busy chatting among themselves, and kept walking, my friends were looking at me in anticipation, hoping a slap on my face. And when I was just 5 meters away, she turned and looked at me.

Within seconds, I looked away, changed my direction and moved briskly to my friends. They started laughing their guts out, mocking at me. The girls looked around suspecting hoarse laugh and saw us. I tried to hide my face from getting noticed. They went off. I became the protagonist of mockery for about a month and it remained their favorite incident to narrate whenever they ran out of jokes.

A month later, when I introduced the same girl to them, she was told about the incident and they did it with perfection as if it was their foremost duty, the contents were spiced up and my reactions were exaggerated. They are guys after all.

Satyaprakash and Sahir Arora were the two eye witnesses of the famous- ‘The Casanova lake incident’. Satyaprakash was an extrovert, Sahir Arora was an introvert and with them was an all time mediocre. Yes, you win this time. It's me. Throughout my life, I tried to excel in everything possible and turned out to be a mediocre in each of them. But it still gives me satisfaction, as I hardly cared on being mocked at what all I did. At least I did that crazy stuff when there were people around who end up doing nothing in life in the fear of getting crushed under the peer pressure.

So, we were talking about the witnesses, Satyaprakash boasted about all that he could have done on that following day. But we will talk about Satyaprakash later, and believe me you will have too much of him. Here is Sahir Arora, maybe an “aryaputra” but even his close friends did not have any idea about him. Besides being an introvert, he was also very secretive, but in no case does this mean that he was dumb in any sense. The guy was a genius; he never scored out of the crowd but still managed a CGPA of more than 7.0 where I was in the Chetan Bhagat’s fan club of the 5 pointers. I am not calling him a genius because he scored more than me but because the guy knew what he studied, unlike other engineering students who concentrate only on the overview. He wanted to know things in detail and he managed it too. He never studied too many topics but the ones he knew, he knew it in detail.

This is the story of how the genius guy fell for “The Virtual LOVE”.

So, my dear readers.

Let me tell you what virtual love actually is – The term “Virtual love” must have been invented as soon as the word networking was known in the small talk. This implies to anyone / anything stupid on Internet to which your dopamine secretes. It can be a girl next door with a misleading profile picture on facebook, or maybe a guy who promises to be a rockstar in his account and manages to fool a teenager sitting thousand miles away, who would eventually fall in love with him. (Here, I am just referring to dopamine; Internet is full of material to activate your other important hormones as well but keeping the decorum of the blog I am not going into it.)

In starting of this post, I talked about the possibilities of finding love on facebook. Alas ! there are no possibilities. But Sahir found his love on a social networking site.

Which one ?

Orkut.

Oh! common, it’s a wrong answer.

Sahir was a CBSE delhi product. So, if you CBSE guys remember, CBSE’s management ones made a site to help all the students who were ready to commit suicide every now and then. It never helped though. Apart from the result, which was obviously a big turn off, there was something which made this site even more popular. It was not counselors, notices or forum. It was a chat section made with high hopes, that students all across the country would discuss important questions and topics to prepare for the exam. The so believed "bright" students might help the "weak" students, but, it obviously served a different purpose. It was a chat bar full of online young blood, with nothing to do. The chat mostly contained abuses to each other which reached to the level of mothers and sisters. It was just a time pass for Sahir, until he found his love there.

Or what he thought it was.