Willy Loman of Facebook

I resist the first temptation to block a thinly-remembered friend who clutters my wall. Instead, his streaming updates slowly engender a perverse compulsion to keep refreshing the newsfeed. He wakes up in the morning and duly informs me of the coffee he’s had. During the day, he tells me he’s missing so-and-so, that he just had another coffee, questions if we really need a politician in office, forwards a jingoistic appeal, gets nostalgic about the simpler times, declares that he’s proud of his identity, looks forward to the weekend, sings along to a song on an iPod, gleefully awaits a car launch, plans a trip to a pretentious restaurant, reviews a movie offering that the direction could have been tighter – peppering the updates with borrowed quotes and puns. No one comments, even when he marauds through the news-feeds of his 400 friends – “lol”ing at their witty statuses, vigorously nodding and adding “True!” to the introspective ones, “liking” each of their photographs and links, and intercepting their wall-to-wall exchanges with his own comments; but they do not reciprocate – even when he offers his witty two cents on a topical scandal they are commenting on elsewhere.

Through one of his updates, I discover his blog titled “Randomly Arbit Ramblings”. There I discover painfully constructed diagrams classifying Facebook users, more movie reviews, a blow-by-blow account of a trip to the top of some hillock, fierce ranting after another terrorist attack and only one comment and ten profile views in its six-month history; I wonder if the ten includes my own visit.

He turns argumentative – questioning the worth of the contribution of a cricketer when someone hurrahs a milestone; esoteric – “Never was a time.”; woefully desperate – “I feel like crying.”

One day he declares that he’s planning to delete his profile. We wait with bated breath when no comment still comes in and the updates actually stop. Just when I start believing that he has left, he limply hobbles back. The updates stream in again, albeit not the bubbling brook they were once.

“I hate fb”, he confesses. I almost decide to “like” it.