Skip to main content

Selfies

Fiction

“Which topi did you buy?”  She asked while her fingers flew with supersonic speed on the virtual keypad of the smartphone commenting on the selfies posted by her countless friends on Facebook.

“Your favourite brand,” he said indifferently.  He was busy with the selfie videos posted by his other girlfriends on Whatsapp.  He couldn’t remember which her favourite brand was.  It doesn’t matter, he knew.  She was not likely to notice it.  What does the brand name of an artificial skin matter when the bliss experienced by real skins explodes like a neural bomb in the brain making it oblivious to everything else?  He knew girls well enough to understand that their brand choices were only ways of inflating their already overblown egos. 

“Hey, look here,” she said.  “Our PM has sent a selfie after casting his vote.”

“He is our leader,” he said without looking at what she was playing with.  He was busy with his own selfie messages on Whatsapp.  But he added, “The leader of selfies.”

“When are you taking me to dinner?” another girlfriend was enquiring after sending him a beautiful selfie video of hers.

“2moro, darlin,” he punched in his response quickly.  “bzy 2dy.”

And he clicked his latest selfie and sent it to her.

“Shall we go?” he asked switching from the virtual to the real.

“Oh, yeah.”  She said.  “Just a moment.”  She clicked a selfie and enriched the Facebook with it.  “Ready,” she sounded contented.


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. In the land of blind, the one eyed is the king. Won't say more

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not blind, rather too many eyes open. Recently an 'Open' columnist wrote that our PM is his own image consultant and interpreter. India was just waiting for someone like that, it seems. The whole of India may become their own image consultant and interpreter soon. That's the new mantra.

      Delete
  2. Great post...very insightful...thanks for sharing..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great post........feel better to read this post.............
    http://www.alltopsecret.com/

    ReplyDelete
  4. A perfect and effective way to convey the current craze of our country you really nailed it sir.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's always amusing to watch youngsters nowadays, whether in the metro train, or cafeteria, or just anywhere - they're always busy with their mobile phones. And most pics they put are of their own. Hence this story...

      Delete
  5. A laugh riot right from the word Go.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Really nice post, the way you convert reality into fiction....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not difficult to create this kind of fiction, Arpita, because it is the actual reality translated into words.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...