Pages

Monday 13 July 2015

Too many Indians?

A few months ago, I pruned my Facebook-friends. A Facebook-friend is someone you might know slightly, and who might know you slightly, or the two of you have someone who you both know slightly. The criterion I used, was to prune all the people who posted in a language that I don't speak, or who posted invitations to join in games. Quite possibly their posts were deep and meaningful, but since I couldn't read them, of no meaning to me. And I don't play Facebook games.

Again, I'm facing a decision. There's 1,300 million Indians, a lot of them have computers (or smartphones), and I'm guessing that nearly all of those, speak English. Indeed, one of the great benefits we gave India (and America, and many other countries) was the gift of English. But the problem I'm having, is that quite a large percentage of the posts that I see, go completely over my head. I don't know who their politicians and film stars are. Some of the postings from my Indian Facebook-friends aren't in English (I don't know what language they are in, all I know is that I can't understand them). There are marriage announcements from people I've never heard of. And so on.

So a second round of pruning (not only of my Indian Facebook-friends) is about to start. I hope that the Facebook-friends who get pruned don't take offence. Ideally, they'll never know.



2 comments:

  1. OMG!! You have 1.3 BILLION Indian friends !! WOW!
    Now if you sent each one an email asking for £1 you would be very rich!!

    ReplyDelete