Arbit e-volution !!

I was talking to Nikhil the other day, when he refered to Arbit Choudhury as a "New Generation Comic Character". His words have been resonating inside me ever since. Arbit is indeed a 21st Century comic character, one who has completly been born and brought up Online. Arbit Choudhury was first launched in MastishK, an Online Management Games Extravaganza. Then, Arbit reached thousands of fans through e-mail forwards. The latest Arbit Choudhury strips are now released on the regular basis through the Arbit Yahoo Group and Website. Arbit Choudhury jokes are also available on India Times 8888 SMS service, under the keyword 'MBA', which is perhaps another 1st for any comic character. Going forward, we plan to take Arbit Choudhury to his fans thorugh other new-age communication channels like RSS feeds, Pod casting and Animation Films, thus covering the entire gamut of electronic media.

Hemant and Me have now passed out of NITIE, and work from locations as far apart as Hyderabad, India, and Geneva, Switzerland. With it, the Making of Arbit has also gone fully online. This is where Arbit Choudhury owes a lot to tools like GMail, GTalk, and Writely. While we collaborate and synchronise our operations across geographies, I can't, at times, help but feel pleasently amused by our own Global Delivery Model. Just the other day, we were symultaneously working on a document on Writely, and discussing the same over GTalk Voice Chat, my mike when bust. I could hear Hemant, but he could not hear me. So, we ended up setting a new Voice vs. Text Communication Paradigm, as Hemant spoke and I replied in text !!

The extent of our IT dependence is best summed up by Hemant, when he says, in his own inimitable style, that our daily routines begin with "Google before Gargle", and that the 3 basic necessities of our lives have become "Bread, Butter and Broadband" :)

When I ruminate over Arbit Choudhury's evolution as a Comic Character, I cannot help but feel that Arbit Choudhury owes his success completely to the Internet Age. It would have been virtually impossible to take a new-born comic character so quickly to afficianados across the world, before the advent of the web.

Tim Barners Lee, I owe you a treat :)

P.S.:- Today, I complete two years on Blog World. Thanks to Sallu for introducing me to this wonderful arena. Blogs represent the final frontier in "Freedom of Expression", by giving anyone who wants to say something, a public platform to do so. What will be the next revolution hitting Blog Land? Keep checking this space for more :)

Life is Beautiful

Two most unexpected things happened to me last week, bringing some joy into the otherwise mundane goings-on in life.

Last Sunday, I met an old school mate of mine, who had located me on Orkut. As we hugged each other, his 1st words to me were, "10 years.. We meet after 10 years.. I guess we have a lot of catching up to do..". It is times like these, when someone mentions such long periods of time, that you begin to realise, you have already spent a considerable amount of time on Planet Earth. As we sat together to rewind and replay our experiences over all those years, both of us when through a mixed bag of emotions. As we parted later, he said to me "You have not changed one bit." I replied, "Neither have you."

The 2nd event hit me like a jolt (an pleasant jolt, I must add). As I was sloggin it out in office the other day, I got a call from another good old pal. He and another batchmate of his (who is also a friend of mine) had decided to tie the knot after a 3 year long friendship. For the next half hour, all my colleagues in office kept getting constantly perplexed by the mysterious smile on my face. It is funny how one can feel as happy for someone else, as one does for himself. That day, I had fully understood the meaning of "vicarious".