Jack and the beanstalk(er)

Hi! How are you dear?

Who is this?

I did not send you my new number? Now guess

This was the rough start of a chain messaging with an anonymous number who one fine afternoon messaged me. I don’t know how to frame this sentence correctly but... the person insists that he/she/it is a female and knows almost everything about me. Added advantage is that she is single *ahem*. Now I am quite sure that it is some friend who is playing a prank coz I don’t have my mobile number displayed anywhere in public and more so coz I changed my own number a few weeks back. My first suspect was Aditi coz I had played the ‘stalker-on-cell prank’ on her with help from her sister Pooja he he he… it was fun :P. But then now it seems she is not the culprit :D. So who might be the person on the other end? I don’t know and don’t want to know coz the person is really smart in her (let’s stick to one pronoun) replies and if her identity is revealed then I would lose fun in those replies. Now I am safely assuming here that she is someone I know but what if she is really a stalker? He he... now if that person is reading this space by some chance I am not calling you a stalker but just thought of this so chill! Why I am thinking this is not coz of the anonymous sender but recently the newspaper was swamped with stories of stalking. Cyber stalking is not a new phenomenon but with media coverage and public awareness more and more stories are coming forth. But a new trend has started that whenever a crime under this is reported everyone blames the social networking sites like orkut, facebook etc. for this. I mean it is right up to an extent that we meet and tend to get close with unknown people but turning these sites into a scapegoat is not the solution. In Mumbai, a rich man’s son was murdered after being kidnapped by his new found friends on orkut. So when the news reports were being widely publicized, my cousins were ‘scrapping’ on orkut. Dad was at home on a leave and he got curious from the news reports that what the hell is orkut all about. So he finally managed to convince my sis that he wanted to know about it. When he came to know that I was also a member of orkut he was like “Really?” Probably my dad still thinks that all I know is MS Word and Excel… he he he. I knew this day was gonna come and I had already spruced up my profile and mainly removed the link of this space. I don’t have any particular reason to keep this site away from parents and relatives but yeah I would like to keep it that way. Luckily there is so much in the profile there that he never managed to read it. I know we have digressed from the stalking issue. I was talking to a colleague last week and one of her ardent admirers (she might have many coz she is pretty) had created a fake profile of hers on orkut. Generally fake profiles contain objectionable matter but this profile was kept so clean that none of her friends had an idea that they were talking to her stalker and not her. Luckily she and her boyfriend managed to nail the person and a simple threat worked. But the need of the hour is strengthening of laws to curb this stalking menace. Some people are demanding banning of orkut in the wake of these cases but I don’t think banning a site is the solution. Remember the ban on blogspot by the government? It is quite a debatable issue and what we can pray is that everyone is safe among the stalkers roaming around in the virtual and real life.

I am going on a 2 week leave for preparing for the exam on 18th of this month. After that as well a couple of exams are lined up. So won’t be around for a while... all of you take good care of yourselves and keep smiling.