The Move Back to Civilization.. Not Yet to Life

Last two years have been quite interesting and I’ve had many emotional and physical moves, met many people, taken many leaps and still I’m mostly the same me! This post is to reminisce about how the past two years have or have not changed me and experiences I’ll remember for a very long time, possibly a lifetime. It is an effort to summarize my move from Delhi to Bloomington to San Francisco.

“Where”

I don’t usually write with an audience in mind, these posts are just a log and a vent for my creative self to find a way. So just for the record, I moved from New Delhi, India to Bloomington, IN, USA. If you know both places you know that they are opposites. The move reversed my life in every which way you can think of. From an earning professional to a student, from chauffeur driven cars to public transport and from lackadaisical evenings to vigorous schedules! In short, I moved to get my MBA at IU’s Kelly School of Business and now I've moved to San Francisco, CA in search of a career.

“Why”

Why did I move from India to US, what was it! The desire to make money! Better life! Professional growth! New people! The Answer I think is a bit of that all and more and most of all the Independence, the feeling that you will break free of the world you’ve known. I am a loner, someone who cannot do without at least two hours of alone time a day. Those two hours are mostly to reflect on life or sometimes just day dreaming, but whatever I do in those hours it’s hard to imagine a life without those hours. Whatever my reasons be for the move, those two hours were my motivation.

“What”

I can write a few books on the topic of what these years of my life have given me. Academically there’s no doubt that I know way more about how the world functions and that is something I expected. The fun lies to explore the unexpected learning of these years. These years taught me a lot about myself, the world and how these two entities connect.

- Life was never so much of struggle, so I have learned how good friends can make a hardship easy to handle and live with.

- I was never a talker, so I’ve learned that being able to strike and keep a conversation alive can take you places.

- I was never confident, so I‘ve learned confidence is not in-born, it is built one brick at a time and each brick counts.

That is how I’ve changed but I’m still as determined, ambitious, sincere and hardworking. I am still the emotional fool, who can take things to heart. And yes I still have the intuitive capability to look through any person and read the words they are not speaking. I have an installed receiver that can capture and decode emotional signals, so to sayJ. OK, enough bragging!

The Move to Civilization

I moved back to the city, to noises of people on the move and to a world of expecting the unexpected from a relaxed environment of a small town. I have learned the way of life and much more from the small town and maybe I’ll go back sometime to another small town. As of now, I feel at home amid the noises and pace of life I feel the calm. I hope the move be as fruitful as I expect it to be. Amen!

The Peril and Payback of Social Media

I am devoting this post to map the earliest remembrance I have of Social Media in my life, how it has evolved around me, and the perils and paybacks I have experienced over this enthralling journey I have shared with my computer and online social media networks..

The Social Intro

The earliest memories go back to early 2004. I was still in college, and everyone was talking about Orkut, a social networking site popular in India. Technology geek and internet junkie I was, I signed up soon after. I spent the first few months just trying to get my hands around the idea of online networking, adding all the friends or real contacts in the virtual world and using the wall as a delayed chatting tool. This was before SMS and mobile phone fever had caught up and scraps, or wall posts, were the closest thing. It was August 2004 and I discovered the communities. There was one for everyone: for your sun sign, educational institution, city, political party, even the food, restaurant or place you liked. I soon found myself a member of over 20 communities that described my interests, location and educational background, etc.

Introduced to the World, squeezed into a website

"Scorpio" was one of the communities I joined. With stringent rules and actual government, "Scorpio" was different than the other communities I had joined. As I started reading through the threads and topics on the community, I realized they had very little to do with the sun sign. This was a brewing pot for the creative mind--a poet, a writer, an astrologer, a software engineer, a doctor and a teacher sharing their creative prowess. I was sucked into this virtual world, and these people from across the globe became my first virtual contacts. All of us were unsure of what we could do with the immense capability this new tool provided us. Among many other threads, we started a soap opera with all the members as characters. Everyone pitched in with their creative thoughts for the most amazing twist and turns.

The Peril

By mid-2005, "Scorpio" had over 10,000 members, and spam attacks were common. The community moderators (including me) were always watching to cut short any attempts. The community grew to over 30,000 by 2007, and the number of disgruntled spammers grew. Eventually, one moderator's account was compromised by a spammers who wiped out the community's maze of threads, and all of our creative efforts were gone. It was a perilous phase of my online presence; but by this time, all of the contributors had bonded very well, and we began to rebuild. Although we lost a lot of soul in the attack, we still have close to 35,000 members today.

The PayBack

I joined Business School in Fall 2007, as my virtual friends were all aware. The economy soon showed the signs of a slowdown. 2008 rolled in, and I found myself without an internship. One of my contacts from "Scorpio" lived in New York and helped me to network with many people, one of whom eventually put me in touch with my manager at the company where I interned. And guess what, I was working on developing online communities to help people network internally!

The Evolution

While I was busy in my own world, socializing online and making friends I have never met in person, the social media exploded, and I discovered my 5-year-old cousin had an account on 3 different social media websites! I opened my Facebook account when I joined B-School, and it has now become the primary social media around which my life revolves. But the world has expanded, and it is no longer the small world I once knew. The population explosion is phenomenal, and social media start-ups like Twitter and Flickr have all found their own successful niches. More businesses now have a presence on these websites and, by the day, are spending more marketing dollars to generate viral effects beyond belief.
My own online presence has helped me in more ways than I could have imagined. I have no doubt I'll continue to be surprised as I move toward building a career in this ever-changing world.