My Grandma eavesdrops on Facebook now!

To Facebook or not, has never been a matter of resisting any urges for me. I have always been sure that I don't want to lay the nooks of my life in psychedelically inviting colors to "friends" that I have not socialized beyond the urinal sharing moments of college days. But then my profession demanded that I know facebook much like how a budding architect has to have an opinion or two about the neo-gothic architecture, even though he has no plans to create one tribute to that school. It's the same way why I needed to have an iThing and the reason I still don't, has been delved shallowly in the previous post.

So, I did tip my toe with a Facebook profile, still dense with the sparseness of content and density of blank pixels. I maintained and still largely adhere to two rules that keeps a safe wall between me and Facebook

1. I will not add people to my friends list (No I am not exactly a hermit, but I did not know what to make of this massively noisy place and I did not want active engagement before I knew if adding friends was an equivalent of meeting them for coffee or turning on a permanent tea shop bench inside my living room (Doesn't sound fitting right?)

2. I won't post media (of family, kids, my foreign conquests). While I am pretty sure I won't be ashamed of the photos (None of my family & friends at the events that I go to, has tendencies to commit sexual offenses or wear gossip-worthy haute fashion showing tan lines), I do prefer optimal exposure

Much to my dismay and proving that I am right with being reticent, I have started getting stalked no less by my grandmother. Well, my grandma knows facebook though she doesnt use it. Grandma is a euphemistic allude to those aunties twice removed, the same friend who shared mind-space exactly when we had to share adjacent urinals and who not.

Back in the days (not sure if it was of yore), walls had ears indeed. I have caught a ear or two eavesdropping into the semi-private conversation of other few and slyly using the content to weave a strategy to mute future maneuvers within the family. But it did have its risk. The steel bureau, the staircase underbelly and similarly egregious hideouts were always a compromise between signal reception and safety hazards. There were times when one gave a limb or two to know inconsequential secret between those listened into.

Facebook, it turns out has a wall that's no less a party to the crime than the real world hideouts, that its not longer a mere witness. When a twice removed aunt adds me and has added every cousin of mine (who are all perfectly fine to be willful sources of gossip), my antenna alerts me. Unwillingly, I am already a party to the society of keepers of evidences of oversized friends with undersized dresses partying hard, consumers of pseudo-intellectual rants of teenagers and likers of conversations between friends that we have never known, but for the urinal guy somehow liking it and needed us to know.

Then there are suggestions, that I should be someone's friend and boy did I add a few thinking they themselves asked me to be friended. Its quite embarrassing when you add someone thinking they added you, while we would have initiated such a request only in an inebriated moment. Now at least one them surely would have squinted the eye and done me a favor by accepting my invite.

Now my mom wants to be on facebook so that she can keep up with her sisters and would do that only on a tablet she is planning to buy!

For me, I am hoping for a phasing-out of the book, but for business that needs me in.