There used to be a time when you needed to travel extensively, have a thriving business, earn potloads of money, and be well known, and well heeled to garner a mention on the social circuit, and wangle your way into a club.
There used to be a time when a club meant stone arches and gargoyles. And courtyards and fountains. And coats of arms and disdainful butlers. And morning tea and biscuits from Fortnum and Masons. And liveried servants, and armours kept in glass cubicles.
Well, not any more.
Virtually everyone I know is part of a club now. And none of the clubs can be found on terra firma. They all exist on the Internet. And they are all very very clannish, and they stick close to each other, in the shadows of cyberia, and nobody normal can find them.
And with most of these clubs, a few, if any members have ever met the rest of them, and they usually never meet up, in the fear that the club may disband because in reality they are actually much wierder than what they appear to be online. Ofcourse, when online, wierd is cool. Offline, well, wierd is just wierd.
And most of these clubs have a common thread or a target audience to target. Like followers of Sun Worship, or like Explorers looking for Atlantis, or like people who like Kobe Bryant's style of playing, or like people who have failed over 3 times in their final year of studies (Any level will do). Like people who only like the poetry written by a single posthumously published writer, who has been dead for over 100 years and who, when living, enjoyed a circulation of probably only a 100 daft fools who ever read his poetry. And like naturalists who revel in the comings and goings of nesting turtles on the Galapagos Islands. And like people who are trying to save the earth from solar radiations and piercing the ozone layer. Like people who love a certain genre of motorcycles and cars, and who can discuss mechanical parts of a moving machine with other similarly afflicted souls for the better part of an evening without stumbling. Like people who want to party in their very own coterie, and could just meet up with a few phone calls, but will bandy about their club to everyone and then make a big deal of how exclusive it is. Like people who watch Casablanca 2 hundred and 85 times, and people who know how to make a rocket fly with their bare hands, and people who know how to build bombs at home. Like people who can hack into supercomputers using their 1986 PC, and people who know what the difference between a rare stamp and a postage stamp is, and people who know what the difference between a haiku and a senryu is, and why Martin Luther King was famous (I also know that). Like people who want to fund their business, and people who want business, and people who want other people to do business, and people who dont want to do business, and people who want to retire early in life, and people who never want to retire, and people who want to write only, and people who want to read only, and people who will never understand films and people who understand only films, and people who live in New York and are single, and people who live in New York and are not single, and people who like sweets like Mango Souffle (I like it too) and people who dont like sweets, And people who live in apartments, and people who live in bungalows, and people who have a special breed of dog and people who hate dogs, and people who listen to the news and people who listen to alien vibrations, and people who can do complicated math, and people who hate math. All kinds of people who join all kinds of clubs.
And these people send messages online, and participate in online discussions, and meet people online, and fight with each other online, and send more messages online. And entry can be by invitation only, which can allow you to make people feel smaller than they already do, and you can decide to kick people out whenever you want and you can decide who is good enough and who isn't, and you can as inclusive as you like and as exclusive as you like.
I have decided that I shall start a club too. The Utekkare Blog-reader's club. And it shall be an club of one member only. The most exclusive club ever.
utekkare,
Pranay
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