Trapped In Cyberia

WHY would I want to spend any time in my drab real life when I enjoy such an exciting virtual life!" exults Vivek Bansal, a Chandigarh-based industrial engineer who runs a bathroom-fittings business. "Stimulation, seduction, sex, romance, even love, everything is available at a click on the Internet, without any hassle or money. Off the computer, it's the milkman, clients, a dull routine..." Thirty-one of age and firmly wedded to his computer, Bansal insists that he has decided against marriage despite family pressures: "It'll put an end to my cyberlife. One can switch off the computer at will, not a wife." Though, spending as he does over nine hours a day on the Internet, Bansal admits he's switching off the computer less and less these days.

Ditto Jasleen Arora, a 37-year-old south Mumbai housewife who confesses to a growing agitation as weekends approach. That is when her children and husband tear her away from her computer where she otherwise remains riveted for about 16 hours on a daily average. Weekends are when ugly quarrels erupt about spousal duties over cyber commitments to virtual friends. Not that it's any easier on weekdays. Unsatiated even after her lengthy forays into cyberspace during her husband's workday, Jasleen yanks out some more dark, stolen hours with the computer after she hears his first few snores in the night. "I have two boyfriends on the Net, they know I am married. And they still fancy me. I have even sent them my photographs. We talk inanities for hours. Years since I did that with my husband. One of them might even be flying down from the States to meet me!" she whispers secretively, eyes alight with adolescent glee.

Delhi-based pwd engineer Pawan Garg, 28, is more boisterous about his already having met some of the women he befriended at chat sites on the Net. Two months ago, he actually dashed off to Mumbai to meet one such cyberfriend but didn't quite "like" her as much as he had in cyberspace. These days, even as he scours the Net for better 'female friends', he is in regular telephonic contact with an older woman he had met through the Friend Finder Net service. She too is a committed Net user, works at the Taj Hotel, and has asked him never to call up at home lest her husband finds out. As for his own wife's disapproval over his cyberflings, Garg says with macho aplomb: "She's open-minded. She doesn't mind my making friends through the computer. Only, like all wives, she's a bit nagging about the fact that she doesn't get enough time with me these days because I spend a few hours in front of the monitor." Garg's "few hours" actually stretch out to at least seven. For, after getting back home from office at six in the evening, give or take an hour in between, he is on the Net till about 2 am every day.

Dismiss them as Net junkies or euphemistically christen them Veteran Internauts, but they're a growing tribe that cyberspace is claiming as its captive citizens. Caught in its web world wide, their numbers are growing rapidly even in India. With so many more Internet service providers coming in, Net connections, now at two lakh, are expected to shoot up to a million by the end of the millennium.

Cyber maniacs suffer an overwhelming compulsion to surf the Net, chat with distant and invisible neighbours in the timeless limbo of cyberspace, have torrid cyberaffairs, talk sex with cyberstrippers and rummage their e-mail accounts for fresh arrivals every hour. Consumed by their virtual lives, they are often reluctant to step out into the real world.

"It's to do with the desperate need of this generation to always be in control. To always be in the driver's seat, something the Net makes possible, the way real life never ever can. In the virtual world, you decide who to talk to, what to say, how much to reveal, what role to play and when to leave. You can live your fantasies of being a 16-year-old girl or a stud. Hence the reluctance to leave it for the uncertain, unexpected world outside the computer," analyses Dr Avdesh Sharma, a neuropsychologist.

And as if to prove the expert right, Mumbai-based graphics designer Tanmay Johar quips: "I used to have a social life, now I have a modem!" His wisecracks, however, lose their punch when quizzed about the strain on his family life because of his obsession with the cyberworld. Wit, after all, cannot sugarcoat the fact that fed up with having to share him with a computer, his wife has recently moved back into her maternal home with their six-month-old baby. Nonetheless, Johar does attempt a feeble joke to deal with the difficult situation: "She'll come back. I keep telling her no court will grant a divorce on the grounds that I committed adultery on a computer."

Johar couldn't have cracked this joke in many other countries of the world though. An exhaustive New York Times article on the Internet Addiction Disorder (iad) recently reported the story of a woman in the Pacific Northwest whose husband was granted divorce on the grounds that she spent enormous amounts of time before the computer. Her fixation with the Internet apparently had her forgetting to buy food for her children, taking them to the doctor and buying oil to heat her home. In fact, iad, on which the New York Times story was based, has now been recognised as a diagnosable physio-psychological disorder by the American Psychiatric Association and is under constant research in many universities and medical schools for new symptoms and prescriptives. And one of the terms these studies have legitimised puts a name to the one person who, perhaps, suffers the most indignity because of this addiction-the Cyberwidow.

And there are many such victims of cyber infidelity in Hindustan. Hurt spouses who'd scoff at the Hollywood version of finding puppy love through the Net in mushy movies like You've Got Mail. These sufferers are more women than men, and they squirm under the discomfort of having to deal with a houseful of guests as their spouse dashes off to take another peek at the mailbox. They wake up at nights to find their partner sneaking up to the computer to chat up faceless, often nameless, people in some obscure corner of the world. They discover that what was sold to them as indulging in "harmless" cyberchats by their spouse, have blown into full-bodied extramarital affairs. And they are the ones left to deal with the hurt of losing their partner to a computer.

"It was when he switched on his laptop and connected it to his cell to check his e-mails on our drive to Pune that I decided to leave," says Johar's wife Anusuya. With her baby at her mother's for the past several months, she maintains her departure was the only thing she could have done to ensure her sanity: "I had lost all self-esteem, fighting as I was to be worthier than a computer to attract my husband's attention. And it didn't help that I couldn't discuss my marital problems with anyone. My mother would console me by saying even she had lost my dad to the world of books. And there he was cheating on me every hour, fooling around in stupid chatrooms called Married and Flirting; seducing, sharing and living with those cybersluts..."

So is virtual infidelity any different from actual infidelity, assuming that the cyberaffair does not spill over into real life? Avers Dr Achal Bhagat, psychologist with Delhi's Apollo hospital: "No, it's different and perhaps much more complex to deal with. While the impact assumption by the one indulging in a cyberaffair can be minimised by reasoning that 'it's only on the Net', the intent assumption is given to being maximised by the one at the receiving end into a belief that 'even a nameless, faceless person is more desirable than me'. As a result, the potential damage, the hurt, the agony could be much more than it could otherwise be in a real life extra-marital affair."

Admitting to being a Net addict, Delhi-based architect Nikhil Segel tires of the "excessive focus" on cyberaffairs as the worst consequences of spending zombie hours before one's computer. Extremely Net savvy, he says that virtual life becomes an all-consuming, energy-sapping, exhaustive affair because one becomes a part of a well-knit Net community over time. "It becomes like a club. And you'd like to be available for your friends all the time, it could be night in their part of the world and four in the morning your time. Behave badly with one, and word gets around. It's nerve-wrecking," he points out.

The extent and depth of commitments in what is normally considered a no-strings-attached cyberworld are astounding. Segel, for example, met with a number of his virtual friends in the Tiki Lounge at the Yahoo site about a year ago. After which the lounge was "renovated" and the Tiki Regs (Regulars) left to be with each other at another chat site. So thick is this club that its members meet up each year in the States. This May they are travelling from all over the world to meet up in Ohio. Extremely keen on attending, Segel is heartbroken that he might not be able to work his way around it financially.

"Net addiction is about these heartbreaks at not being able to be around with your virtual friends in whom you've made so much of an emotional investment, as they have in you. Not about some babe you hook up on the web and scrap with your wife about," says Segel. The fallouts range from increased smoking to insomnia, from the insecurity of being around real people to hurting loved ones for opting to keep a cyber appointment over choosing to be with them. As Segel concludes thoughtfully: "It begins with your taking time out of real life for cyber life and ends in taking out time from your cyber life for your real one."

( Some names have been changed to protect identities.)