VIRTUAL DEN

VIRTUAL DEN

20 years back I was a member of an online forum called Virtual Den. Internet was in full bloom, contraweb had not evolved yet and man had not yet set foot on Mars. All these new tele-tranportation has not arrived. People were still wondering about the new wonder of internet and all the benefits and damages it brought to mankind. I was a very avid net surfer and got introduced to a few people through chat (internet chat was very popular then).

Some guys were energetic and brought this forum into being. I joined there by invitation from a friend.

At first I was not interested too much about it. Then after a few visits I got more and more interested , began to know a few people and made a few postings. People were kind and enthusiastic and generally appreciated those. And I made a few friends.

There were lot of golpo gujob (chatting) ,leg pulling ( as it is now in t-t), online romance and cattiness and bitchiness as well.

I was not very good in this “romance” but I liked a few women and a few of them liked me. Some were more adept at it and they had a large number of male or female fans according to their gender.

I also had one or two enemies who did not like me. Although I generally avoided encounters some were forced upon me and I could not disentangle myself from them.

The forum grew for sometime. But then there were regular online scuffles among a few members. Also some new members joined and some did not like them at all. So the scuffles grew. At the beginning it was a bit interesting but as it took quite serious shape some people left the forum out of disgust. After three years or so the old administrators also got a bit tired and the forum became a bit sluggish.

But again some new dynamic members came and it grew again. There were new energetic administrators, new innovations, new romances, new leg-pulling, new themes and new controversies.

There were many kind of people. There were poets, scientists, philosophers, writers, artists and some all combined. Some were gentle ,some kind, some witty, some aggressive. In fact there were all kinds of people.

Also there were meets. Some of the members gathered together, chatted and gossiped and ate food and drank soft drinks and took photographs. These meets were both illuminating in the sense we got to see people whom we only knew by their name and act. On the other hand sometimes these were boring because it looked like getting to know anew and we could not find the same rapport and openness in this new “introduction”.

Virtual Den got smaller again because of the same and some other new reasons. After two or three cycles of growing and shrinking it disintegrated. People got too busy with other things. New technologies like T-T arrived. Some of the key people got too old etc. It became rather obsolete to chat online when one could go any where in earth at will at a second’s notice.

I also grew quite old. As I look from my fifty story condominium below it looks so different. It is a maze of new fly-overs everywhere. I have trouble walking few paces. I manage somehow to write from a very  old laptop ( I am still used to laptops) and reminisce about those days and my beloved wife who passed away a few years back.

Suddenly there is a knock in the door. I manage to get up somehow and open the door.

An old man stood there with a glint in his eyes. I could not recognize him at first. Generally I don’t remember things these days well.

But then he smiled and with a twinkle in his eyes he said..” Don’t you remember me? I am your old enemy ……… from Virtual Den”.