I have been thinking about all the things I wish I could say to still her but can’t since she can no longer understand most of it..

1. I Love You.

2. When you said, eat all your vegetables… you were right. I even eat karela now. I eat everything you ever tried to make me eat, with no fuss.

3. When you said that you believe in me & that you know I will make my own path in life… you gave me strength. And still do.

4. When I got upset over something & reacted with irritation & anger, I know how bad you felt & I am sorry every single day for all those times. Because now even sorry doesn’t mean anything to you.

5. If I was in your place, and you were in mine, I know you would have done much more for me, than I am right now, with my best efforts. That’s what makes you so amazing.

6. I don’t think I will be half as inspiring to anyone as you are to me.

7. No one will ever love me the way you do. Everyday, you see me and smile and hold my hand. & that’s enough.

8. There are times when I wish you could comfort me and wipe away my tears. Then I realise that I don’t even know when you are sad now.

And a million other unsaid things. I love you, mom.

I can’t complete this post anymore.

But rudeness in business meetings is harder to understand. This is not really a rant based on a recent event. It’s just an observation over a long period of time & having also heard the experiences of other people. So you are in a meeting, with people you haven’t met before, and despite there being no disparity in “status”, the other person visibly gives off body language and demeanor that’s condescending, for no reason. This continues through the meeting, until you are completely put off by it. Or you fix a meeting, the other person meets you but spends the entire time buried in their laptop or smartphone, looking up, saying hmm, nodding head but not really respecting you enough to look at you while you speak.Or keeps you waiting for an hour or more despite having fixed an appointment & confirmed it in advance, without apology.

It seems like this attitude is a way for the person to gain importance, to make you think, “this person must be really important or intelligent or brilliant if they have such an attitude”. But that’s wrong. Short of annoying you and making you disrespect the person, there really isn’t any favourable outcome. So really, what’s with being rude?

Personally, I ignore the attitude, don’t display any signs of being affected by it & leave at the end with my own conclusions. But I don’t understand it.

Image source: glamourunderground.com

There’s been a lot of debate over SlutWalk – is it the right way to protest or is it a misguided attempt that actually ends up trivialising the issue. First things first, if you don’t know what it is, in a nutshell:

It began in Toronto, when a police constable suggested in a lecture where he was speaking about crime prevention & safety that “women should avoid dressing like sluts” so that they are not victimised/ assaulted/ raped. This sparked off a protest by women where they marched wearing what is considered provocative clothing & called it SlutWalk – saying that women “are tired of being oppressed by slut-shaming; of being judged by our sexuality and feeling unsafe as a result.”, “SlutWalk has become a mechanism for increased dialogue on victim-blaming, slut-shaming, misogynist and oppressive ideas that need to be challenged. These damaging ideas affect all of us and play into racist, ableist, homophobic discussions, discussions about status, class, sex work, indigenous rights and more that need to be challenged.”

This spread to Chicago, Glasgow, Sao Paulo, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London, Sydney, Brasilia & is scheduled in 12 other cities including New Delhi. (Source: Wikipedia)

Have read many opinions about this for e.g.:

• I don’t want to take pride in the word “slut” and make it mainstream
• This just gives men further license to ogle at you on the street
• Why is it happening in Delhi, where women are unsafe anyway, the only people who will pay attention to them are the same men who treat women as sexual objects
• Women shouldn’t take to the street for the right to be called “sluts”

These are natural reactions from men and women alike, understandable because its a protest aimed at provoking a reaction & the word “slut” is so ingrained in our language as being universally bad that having it used in any way would make a self-respecting person cringe (including myself).

Seema Goswami’s column in today’s HT Brunch says “So, no one is denying women the right to dress any way they feel like. But if you dress to be noticed, then don’t complain when you are noticed. If you dress to attract attention, then you must be reconciled to the fact that you can’t control what kind of attention you will attract. None of this can be used as a justification for rape – but yes, freedom does come with responsibility.” She likens this to leaving a door unlocked at home & someone stealing from you – its your responsibility too. I won’t go into the whole other connotation of leaving something unlocked (think chastity belt).

To me this is over-simplifying the issue. If you dress to be noticed, then don’t complain when you are noticed… as a woman who has been stared at, groped, had lewd things said to, been followed when walking down the street, when traveling in a regular bus/ AC bus, at music concerts etc & multiple times over, I can say that I don’t dress to be “noticed” except in as much as any woman who takes pride in grooming & appearance does. But that doesn’t mean I am not “noticed”. Am I the most beautiful woman in the world or the one with the most sexy figure? No. Nevertheless, I am noticed & treated with disrespect as a matter of course by complete strangers. I know how helpless it has made me feel and on not one of those occasions did I “ask for it”. I cannot imagine how horrific rape would be.

In fact, if you fight back, you get either a blank stare “I don’t know what you are talking about” or a “Who do you think you are, why would I do that considering how you look” (yes, some guy said that to me).

Frankly, I was so disgusted that I stopped using public transport altogether because I was lucky enough to have that option. (And this in Mumbai, the safest city for women in India – that’s definitely my belief). Most women don’t. I have had male friends who say, why do you get bothered by it, just let it go. Why should I let it go? I have a right to express displeasure at being disrespected. I can’t just go on saying this just happens & I should deal with it. That’s exactly why societal change is not taking place.

Sure, all the articles criticising SlutWalk state upfront that a woman has a right to refuse sex & no forced sex can be condoned however they have an issue with the “Slut” in the protest. But that’s exactly the point. The woman who is raped IS labelled a “slut” & it is assumed that she did something wrong by provoking the guy or by being alone with a guy in an enclosed space or in a deserted area,  therefore asking for it.  Time & again, we (men & women both) blame the person who is being victimised – not the person who is the oppressor. The worldwide protest shows that women in all kinds of countries – developed or developing – face this issue. It has struck a raw nerve.

What women are fighting for is the right to not be treated as sexual object whether its because of what they wear or what their character is assumed to be like. If you show cleavage or show bare legs, does that mean a guy has the right to grope you and say something dirty and attack you? When a guy walks down the street bare chested, do women whistle and rub their hands over his body? This doesn’t mean women do not see men in a sexual way. But what is in the mind and what translates into action are two different things.

So how would one protest about something like that? You could just do a standard march down the street or you could dress exactly as people assume you do when you are “asking for it” to make the point. Which would make for more attention thereby translating into awareness? If this wasn’t called SlutWalk, none of us would even be talking about it. Rather than trivialising the issue, it has ensured that the core message is understood by anyone who gets to know about it.

Will some men turn up just to ogle at the women? Maybe. But these kind of men would ogle in public anyway even if the women were fully clothed! What’s new about it? For that matter, its not just men. I have heard women criticising other women even in professional environments talking about a dominating or strong personality and saying “she needs to get laid”. So sex is the answer to making a woman softer & less aggressive? This is exactly what has been ingrained in our minds by patriarchal “values” of what women should be like & that it will take a man to make them like that.

There are too many deep seated notions about what women should and should not do that will take centuries to change. Its already taken many centuries to get here – though we all know that women are still discriminated against from birth on many counts. There are many factors for change such as examining the role of the woman in the house, the woman reinforcing the discriminatory attitude with her children, how media portrays women etc but all that would need a separate blogpost, in fact, a book.

Will SlutWalk change the attitude towards women who are sexually assaulted overnight? No. But its a legitimate form of protest & I believe in the end message – women “are tired of being oppressed by slut-shaming; of being judged by our sexuality and feeling unsafe as a result.”

I am not a “feminist” or a “man-hater” or a “frustrated” woman. I have no doubt that some of those who read this post will think that of me. Nor do I believe that all men think this way about women. Some of my best friends are male & they are amazing human beings, husbands, fathers, sons, brothers. What I believe is that women have an equal place in society. I don’t believe in traditional role-playing & I don’t believe that being a woman automatically makes me a sex object or a man’s property.

What SlutWalk says to me is not that I am defending my right to be called a slut. I am defending my right NOT to be called one in disparaging terms and implying I am at fault.

Close to this is the Phnom Bakheng, or central mountain. There’s a 20 minute easy climb uphill to the top where there’s a temple, and what’s unique about this is that you can see the Angkor Wat from the top of the temple. The temple at Phnom Bakheng was constructed more than 2 centuries before the Angkor Wat. I went in the afternoon, when it was fairly quiet. Its extremely crowded at sunset because there’s a good view. But the steps to climb to the top of the temple are very steep and no more than one person can climb at a time so its single file, which adds to the crowding. I enjoyed this because of the panoramic views.

So after all this, it was time for the famous Angkor Wat! There’s a moat with large body of water at the entrance, The entrance itself involves a long walkway to the main doorway and then an equally long walkway inside upto the main temple. Its imposing simply in the area it covers and how sprawling the grounds and the structures are. Angkor Wat means city temple. It was built for the king Suryavarman II in the early 12th century as his state temple and capital city. As the best-preserved temple at the site, it is the only one to have remained a significant religious centre since its foundation – first Hindu, dedicated to the god Vishnu, then Buddhist. It is the world’s largest religious building.

It’s difficult to understand where to begin here! But eventually I followed the typical route of seeing all the bas-reliefs that line the outer wall of the temple counter-clockwise, then moving to the inner area and so on until I reached the central area with the towers. Just looking at everything that has gone into the creation of this temple is mind boggling. The bas-reliefs are detailed and fill the entire length of each wall. There’s the concluding episode of the Mahabharata, scene from the Ramayana, the depiction of the Churning of the Sea of Milk and many more. The detailing on each would be impossible to assimilate in a single visit. The inner areas have many terraces and pillars leading to the central tower which has 4 different Buddhas. The view from this section of the entire Angkor Wat shows the vastness of space. Easily spend a few hours here so save enough time for it as it closes in the evening. This is a place that you can lose yourself in! Its magical.

On my last day, I thought I would squeeze in some time and go see the temples of the Roluos Group. Lolei, Preah Ko & Bakong were some of the earliest permanent structures built by the Khmer. They mark the beginning of classical period of Khmer civilization, from the late 9th century. Not in as good a condition as the other temples, they are nevertheless worth a trip to see how the temple styles evolved. The most picturesque is the Bakong which was the official state temple of the King Indravarman I. It is situated on a river & has a lovely garden & so makes for a pretty sight.

This concluded a beautiful and memorable trip to Siem Reap. It has stayed in my mind since then and the effect it has is quite frankly hard to forget. Perhaps just like Bhutan has stayed in my mind – its the combined effect of monuments and nature. While I soaked in so many temples on my trip, it definitely warrants another visit at a different time of the year. After monsoon and in the onset of winter, because the water bodies at most temples are full and you can see it in completely different light as well as get some spectacular views during sunrise and sunset. Someday, I will be back in Siem Reap.

Nothing can really prepare you for what you see at Angkor. If you are interested in history, it’s a world you can get lost in. No matter how dilapidated some of the structures are, they are an unforgettable sight & take you back to a time when life was about god-like worship of kings.

The first temple I went to was Ta Prohm, originally called Rajavihara. Ta Prohm means ‘ancestor Brahma’. Its popular with tourists because nature has virtually taken over the temples, large trees grow out of the structure and make for a unique sight. Ta Prohm is also being restored with help from the Indian govt. It has a lot of headless statues as do almost all the temples, since the temples have been looted through history especially during the Khmer Rouge era. The elaborate carvings on the pillars of apsaras and kings are lovely, and soon became a familiar sight as I visited more temples. Many stones lie on the ground from fallen towers and broken pillars. Next I went to Banteay Srei (Citadel of Women). Began in 967 AD. Considered one of the best temples because of its art. It has beautiful intricate carvings and is made from red sandstone & so is very pretty. Most of the other temples are grey. It was one of my favourites of all the temples I saw. On Nikki’s recommendation (the one I contacted on Couchsurfing) I went to see the Banteay Samre (Citadel of the Samre) (named after the population which lived in the region around Phnom Kulen, to the northeast of Siem Reap). It’s usually skipped by most tourists & I was glad I went here. Like most temples, moats for water form a key part of the temple. In fact it set in concentric squares, each separated by a moat which is now dry. By now I had started recognising some of the typical temple features. Circular window bars, apsaras on pillars, the triangular towers. But even with all the similarities, each temple is different and has its own charm.

The other temples I saw on the same day were Pre Rup and Banteay Kdei. After all the walking around in the hot & humid weather, I was looking forward to the comfort of my room! There’s a lot of walking and climbing involved so the temples are not a place for kids or older people. Many of the Temples were designed as temple mountains, representing Mount Meru, so the stone steps are high & also uneven. In many cases the steps are not wide enough for the foot, so you have descend and ascend sideways. There’s a slight sense of adventure in climbing up all the steps to the top & well worth it for the view.

Right opposite Banteay Kdei is the Sra Srang, a lake that’s a popular spot to see the sunrise from. This is where I headed on Day 2 at 5 am! As did many others. But we were all disappointed as it was a cloudy day & the sun was a sliver of red that went behind the clouds almost as soon as it rose. It was a great way to begin the morning though, sitting there at the lake & watching the sky slowly light up. And even better, all the temples I saw next had no crowd as it was still early. Starting with East Mebon, a 10th century temple dedicated to Shiva, I went next to Neak Pean (the entwined serpents). This was unique & I loved it. There’s a long boardwalk leading upto it as it has water surrounding it in the monsoon. The temple itself has several pools on all sides – 8 of them – but all dry now. In the centre is the temple, surrounded by water. The entwined serpents are at the base of the central structure, I couldn’t get there as there’s water all around. It looks quaint, surrounded by green trees & its very, very quiet. It is not imposing as it isn’t a grand, tall structure & that adds to its charm. Right after this, I headed to Preah Khan (Sacred Sword) – its largely unrestored so has a lot of rubble. It’s also maze like as it has entrances from all 4 sides – N, S, E, W. Its only when you climb up (through a lot of the rubble) that you see the temple towers, otherwise, because they are all set so close, you can’t see them from the bottom. You can easily get lost in this one.

So after all this & the early start to the day, it was time for the famous Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat. I had a lunch break to fortify myself before I went to some of the largest temples. Angkor Thom was the last and most enduring capital city of the Khmer empire. It was established in the late twelfth century by King Jayavarman VII. It covers an area of 9 km². It has a central road running through it, and structures, temples and trees on either side.The Terrace of Elephants with beautiful carvings, the Phimeanakas where the king spent the first watch of every night with a woman thought to represent a Nāga, the Baphuon which is under restoration & of course the famous Bayon. While there is a lot of walking involved, it’s also through very green patches, lawns, trees, shrubs & its quite pretty.

With its 54 towers, each with the head of Bayon on all four sides, there are 216 heads staring at you as you enter the Bayon temple! Who’s head is it? Well it may represent the king himself, the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, guardians of the empire’s cardinal points, or some combination of these. There are many steps & towers to go through and this one because of its popularity was full of tourists. No moments of solitude possible here. The main entrance to the Bayon – through which I exited – is grand and imposing with Devas & Asuras lined on either side of the road.

Does this sound exhausting? Well it was! And my day wasn’t over yet! A lot more to come culminating in the famous Angkor Wat – in the next post.

The Old Market (Psar Chaa), Pub Street and all the main restaurants were close to my hotel so I walked there often. Amongst the first few little restaurants I spotted was an Indian one, India Gate, promising the best Indian food in Siem Reap & an authentic Indian chef. Not that I stepped into even one, though I found there were, in fact, a few more – Curry Wala being another one with multiples branches.

What I found strange initially was men on bikes who stop & ask if you want to hop on. It’s a taxi service of sorts, an alternate to hiring a tuk tuk. But it can seem stalkerish until you read about it in the guide books!

The Old Market area is somewhat reminiscent of Goa. But with better dressed tourists! The women probably make an effort to cover a little more of  themselves after reading the guide books. Strongly recommended online, Khmer Kitchen is run by a local & has 3 restaurants in a 1 Km radius. It’s definitely great food at great value & all the food i had there was excellent. They also have deals such as free welcome drink, cold towel, happy hour till closing, or free beer/ coconut water with lunch. It isn’t that hard to find vegetarian food but if you are concerned about the vessels that it’s being cooked in or its proximity in the kitchen to non-veg food, you would then find it very difficult to eat anything at most places. But otherwise, you can pretty much find any kind of cuisine you want, including the local Khmer curry and rice & amok – fish curried and steamed in banana leaf (which everyone told me was excellent). And how can you wrong with a street called Pub Street! Alcohol is cheap, drinks are potent, and everyone is having a good time.

I bought some souvenirs at the markets, most of which begin at 3 & 7 pm. Bargain, bargain, bargain – just as any other self respecting Indian would! In fact it’s tough to buy things that don’t look like they come from India! From scarves to cloth bags to carved Buddha heads to jewellery, everything looks like something you would find here except for the Tin Tin posters that abound.. People use the same tricks of the trade to make a sale. “You are first customer” “I give you good discount because you are early” etc. Don’t fall for anything. If you really want to buy something, spend time walking around different markets, you will find prices drastically fluctuate. But unless you choose to buy specific stuff like Angkor printed scarves or the head of Bayon (will explain in a later post), you are better off saving your dollars. USD is freely accepted currency here so you don’t need to change into Rial – in most cases, I even received the change back in USD.

Nikki, an American living in Siem Reap, teaching English to students in a vocational school, who also runs the local Couchsurfing group, very sweetly picked me up from my hotel on her little scooter & took me to this fantastic veg restaurant called Vitking for dinner. I would never have found it by myself! It was fascinating to hear about the kind of work she is doing & the aspirations of the Cambodian people, driven by the tourism industry. She came to Cambodia on a trip once and immediately felt at home. She also works with local NGOs to help them get more professional and hence get better funding. A great dinner that, with excellent food. She gave me the very useful tip of visiting Banteay Samre, which is a temple near the more popular Banteay Srei, and one that most tourists don’t visit. Definitely a good tip because I am glad I didn’t miss it.

Walking around the area on another day, I went further up towards the Stung River. A completely different area from the Old Market, this has wide roads, a huge temple built in the 14th century and the National Museum and a large Park further up the road. With much fewer tourists, it’s quiet and relaxed. Most local Cambodians, however, see you for what you are – a tourist – and hope that you will buy something. If a kid just gives you a trinket saying it’s for good luck, beware, most of the time they do want to sell it to you. I was offered everything from bangles made of cane to paper rings to flowers. Some insisted it was free, others asked for money. Can’t blame them since tourism is the mainstay of their economy. But, in general, the people are very friendly and helpful. They have warm smiles & many know about India. Everyone doesn’t know good English, many speak a basic version. When I tried asking where I could get a SIM card for my phone, I was usually handed a business card of the place!

All about the Temples in the next post.

I won’t be blogging about Singapore since it involved meeting friends, enjoying the super nightlife and of course, shopping. It wasn’t my first trip so I didn’t do any sightseeing. As glorious & memorable as it was, its not what you want to hear about, do you? I shall head straight onto Siem Reap.

I have always wanted to visit the Angkor Temples and it’s been somewhere on my mind, thoughts usually ending with a ‘some day’. So when I was looking at what places I could go to from Singapore, I began reading about Cambodia and decided that was it! Fairly easy to go to as well since there’s visa on arrival. March is the end of the high season for Siem Reap (the town close to which all the Angkor Temples are located) since it’s the beginning of summer. This also suited me well as it was not difficult to get flight tickets on days of my choice and hotel bookings too. I booked everything online & I can tell you that there is no need for a travel agent. I don’t believe in them. Spend sometime reading up about your destination online, make your itinerary & just do all the bookings. Simple. My trip started on a fab note when I was upgraded to Business Class on Silk Air.

Was it safe for me to travel by myself? Absolutely. Since I am on Couchsurfing, I got in touch with a few couch surfers and got a few tips beforehand. There’s a great Cambodia forum on CS which answers most questions & any other questions I had, I asked Nikki, who runs the forum. She was extremely helpful and even offered to take me to dinner to a great new vegetarian restaurant when I got there. I would have of course, liked to Couchsurf in Siem Reap but couches weren’t available for the dates I wanted. So after a lot of research, I chose the Steung Siem Reap Hotel, and did not regret it for a minute. It was a fantastic location, right next to the Old Market and Pub Street, the central area for food, nightlife & shopping in Siem Reap. Unlike people who would stay at hotels closer to the temples and have to take Tuk Tuks to come to this area, it was a much better option to stay in this area as the temples only take 30-40 minutes to get to by Tuk Tuk. Being from Mumbai, that’s a breeze!

Why solo? Well, it just so happened this way. I have travelled solo and with friends. Both are different experiences and there’s something good to be said about both. With friends, there’s never a dull moment, you share all your experiences, and enjoy their company. Solo travel gets you to meet different people since you are more open to conversation with people sitting next to you. It’s lovely to speak to people from different cultures, doing different things in life and a welcome change from all the digital, marketing & advertising conversation that I am surrounded by in Mumbai! I met Gerda, a Dutch lady, travelling solo on my flight in, she stayed at the same hotel and was on the same flight out. So the journey to & fro became memorable instead of it being just another airport-flight-airport-hotel experience. Gerda lives with her family in Singapore & was taking her first solo break from her life and kids for a few days. Some ‘me-time’. I didn’t plan any of my temple visits with her but I very much enjoyed chatting with her about my life & hers, India & its culture, and her travels all over the globe.

Next post will be about Siem Reap & of course, the Temples!

I got some great advice from these blogs & forums, so do check these out too.

Traveling Mark, Bombay Nomads, Fodors, Frommers

What are they?

• Every morning, my mom and I sit together when she wakes up; she holds my hand tight & talks to me with a big smile on her face. I love it. It’s a bond that needs no words.
• In the past few months I have met many friends who no longer live in this city/ country and even our regular conversations have taken me back in time and made me feel many years younger. Ok, maybe I am just getting old.
• I recently attended the wedding of one my closest friends and I was just in a serene, happy state throughout – and my life was on pause for those 3 days.
• I occasionally listen to a few songs (that I love) on loop  & that has made my morning drive something I treasure – even with killer traffic. No, I don’t do that if someone is with me.
• The flowers blooming in all my plants, with their myriad colours, make me pause to admire them & yes, I speak to my plants!
• Some conversations have given me unexpected clarity – about myself, about life. No, I haven’t discovered the meaning of life.
• I have made some great new friendships that I would have thought were unlikely. And it’s always a good feeling to have more friends!
• I am trying to develop a new hobby – but more on that only if it works out!

Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it is! I couldn’t have been happier than I am, with all these little moments, making for a great life. This fragment from As I Walked Out One Evening always plays in my head.  “And Time will have his fancy,  To-morrow or to-day.” W H Auden

So there was no Doc, no fancy time machine, no big clock that allowed me to set a date, no lightning. But it was pretty significant all the same.

This email was from last week, three years ago, and was a message I sent to myself. I won’t reproduce the message here, because it is private. But essentially it was about what I was going through then, and wondering if I would have found the answers, by the time I read this email, three years hence. There were a lot of hopes I mentioned in it as well. As I read it, I knew that while I hadn’t found the answers to a few things, the questions had changed! The things I was most concerned about then, have turned out to be things I needn’t have worried about. Some things have remained the same, but in doing so, are no longer a matter of concern either. As for the hopes, well, they remain hopes. Probably because they are best left at that.

It’s strange how much time one spends thinking or feeling about things that seem so critical to life, and then finds a few years later, that while they matter, they haven’t taken the form one feared or expected. It is in fact this very unpredictability about life that means we shouldn’t worry about these things at all. Just continue to do what you have to do. Easier said. But I found some proof! Sure, I have maintained diaries before, and when I read them now, I wonder why I thought like that. But this was a mail I sent to my future self. So it wasn’t as much a record of what I was doing then, as it was me telling myself what I wanted/ expected/ hoped. But what if things have turned out in a way that your worst fears are in fact quite benign?

I attended this session once, a philosophical/ spiritual discussion & the speaker said, the problem with the pursuit of happiness, is that you are always in pursuit. So you can never find it. Stop the pursuit and it will come to you. Sounds simple but trying to put it in practice is tough. This doesn’t mean you don’t do what you have to do. It just means you stop taking that moment and projecting it into a big ‘what if’and building a whole set of expectations to go with it. This involves struggle and this involves friction. Whereas if you simply do what you do, in that moment, leave it there and go into the next moment, you stop struggling. You surrender.The crux of many of our historical & mythological texts. I have been trying to do this for a long, long time. Succeeded a few times, but sank back into it. This email really had an impact on me.

The very fact that many of those things had changed in context, and in doing so changed in significance, reminded me that my present should not be doing the same to my future. Projecting/ expecting/ wanting. It’s not the pursuit that matters, it’s the relentless surrender.

Am I writing to a note to my future self now? No. I don’t believe I need to.

Image source: www.fwdmarketing.co.uk

Tweets, Facebook updates, LinkedIn updates… The pressure to answer that ‘what are you doing?’seems to have afflicted all of us. Am sure your daily newsfeed is full of such updates, some that you enjoy, some that annoy and some that you just want to hide. Thought it would be good to categorize these (am guilty of some of these myself). You can share any that I have missed! And hey, don’t get offended. Chill.

1. The Location Flogger:
This person got onto Foursquare and got all excited, so linked everything to the Foursquare account. Now you know where this person is on a second to second basis. “AW checked into his own office” every morning, no doubt that’s where you should be… “at the international airport”… “at the shady bar down the street”… “In the 8th floor loo”… There isn’t a place the person hasn’t checked in. And soon become the ‘Mayor of random roadside streetlight”. Unless one is trying to establish an alibi for a murder investigation, it’s hard to see why every check-in is news-worthy.

2. The Self-Conversationalist:
This person believes that the way to talk to oneself is through the update. So the updates will be incomprehensible to anyone else. “JM said I rock in MZY 5 years ago & I think I am still the goddess of FGJKTY” Say what?! Who’s JM? What’s FGJKTY? You will never know even if you ask. You’ll probably get a smiley in response.
Or there will be something supposedly intriguing like “can’t stop smiling” to which some unsuspecting friend will say ‘I think I know why’& the response will be “you think you know but I know you really don’t ” at which point said friend will give up, as will everyone else. Until it’s repeated.

3. The Apportunist:
If an app has launched, it must be tried, & must be allowed to keep updating the status for everything possible that’s inane. Who’s my celebrity lover, what animal cub am I, dhongibaba ki bhavishyavani, boredville, flutopia, crystalballfengshuihorroscopetarotparrotiser, there isn’t a thing that hasn’t been tried and broadcasted and invites sent out for. In fact there are no updates of any other kind. The newsfeed is full of farms, animals, restaurants, wars, zoos.

4. The Self-Promoter:
Whether this person was featured in page 16, bottom-most corner buried beneath articles like ‘experts say exercise leads to weight loss’& got exactly 5 words or whether this person’s tweet wishing Mallika happy birthday was randomly picked by Bombay Times as ‘Fans wish Mallika’, you will know about it. And not through the element of surprise either! This will be updated across Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter so you don’t have a hope in hell of missing it. This will continue for any of the 15 bytes of fame this person gets.

5. The (Non-stop) Commentator:
This person wants everyone to know about everything that’s happening around him/ her, no matter how interesting (not). “f***ing traffic crawling at a snail’s pace”, “frequent flyer lounge seems to be less crowded today”, “guy next to me in the train is looking over my shoulder as I type this”, “there are crows kawing outside”, “driving, car next to me playing munni badnaam, it rockz!”, “Monday is here again”… No matter how innocuous, it will be shared.

6. The Ranter:
This person uses the status update as a venting machine. Whether it’s a product that isn’t liked or the GPRS has gone off or the Blackberry is hung or the favourite team is losing the game or the boss left early and he/ she’s staying late or the tea in office is bad… You get the drift. Everything sucks, or is #fail. In fact they are also most likely also say “my job sucks” when everyone including the boss can read it. You really want to tell them to calm down for fear of them suffering from blood pressure or heart ailments.

7. The Armchair Activist/ Critic:
A close cousin of The Ranter, this person could solve all the problems of the world, if he/ she were not tweeting or facebooking. Too bad they are too busy doing all this so they can’t run the country. “What was the govt thinking” “no other solution to inflation worries except…” “nothing in this country will ever work when so- and- so is minister”, “Kashmir issue can be easily solved if we…”, ” what was Chidu thinking”… No doubt there maybe some valid point, but constantly putting it up here isn’t going to change anything, is it?

8. The Quoter/ World Peace Finder:
Believes that he/ she can change the world either by quoting something deeply philosophical or spiritual or by writing messages about loving your brothers & sisters. “Let us pray together, I will pray for everyone’s happiness” “start your day with a smile & pass it onto strangers till it comes back to you”. The Quoter finds a famous phrase and shares it everyday, many times forgetting to give credit to the original creator, & amassing ‘likes’/ retweets with comments such as ‘wonderful’, ‘lovely’, conveniently pocketing praise for something someone said 200 years ago.

9. The Incomprehensible:
“lyf rockzzz n den getz u kut in peesez”. Self explanatory, right?

10. The Joker:
Funny guy with a great knack for punning and for finding the funny in everyday life. These updates are a laugh- riot and non-stop entertainment. Needless to say these are popular and appreciated and people look forward to them to brighten up their day.

Note: Any resemblance to person or persons is coincidental (or not)