Ordeal for a BROADBAND Connexion

Homecoming is always sweet. You are home and so you are the KING. At least I am when I come home after a long gap. Mommy just dotes on you and Pops brings all those things YOU like. Mommy doles out the recipes from her Huge Arsenal that wouldn’t fit Pops diabetes routine but nevertheless fares I’d die to gorge on. A welcome change from the bland Mess khana and other kgp stuff. Lots more love fill the day.

Two or three days pass until normalcy is restored. After the initial euphoria settles down, comes the laziness. There is not much on earth you can do but idle away your time. Watching TV and reading the odd magazine consume most of the time and then it is time for you to miss, inarguably, the most important thing in your life for the past 3 years – Kgp’s LAN. It just is something whose absence, you feel, leaves a gaping whole in your daily itinerary. You have grown so used to it and made it such an essential part of your life that its absence really hits you hard.

You feel disconnected from the entire universe and you just can’t stay with that feeling. The closest you can reach is having an internet connection at home. Even though the internet connection might not promise all the benefits that our beloved LAN provides us, something’s better than nothing, you’d agree.

So you reach for the nearest and fastest ISP provider and he promises you the connection in a day when you pay the exorbitant amount. You might argue that any measly sum would seem exorbitant when you pay nothing for the 24 hour net supply in Kgp – in addition to DC++, the source of all movies, sitcoms, series, videos, music there is on the planet. But then that’s the way it is. Whichever way you look at it, TATA INDICOM Broadband is about at least 10 times costlier than BSNL’s Dataone connection. I still rue the fact that there is no BSNL landline at home or else I would have surely preferred the latter.

2 days pass and there is no sign of any personnel from the Tata Indicom. So you go and shout your dismay there and warn and threaten him (The frustration of not being connected is what is supposed to be blamed for all those actions, I suppose). A week passes by wherein each day you barge into the ISP office and threaten and plead him for the connection. Fed up with the daily nuisance he lands up one fine day in the house and the connection is done.

Now that the internet connection has arrived, you feel a bit ecstatic. You begin surfing and then the problems begin. Half the time the server is down (I had to ring up the call centre and register 5 complaints in the span of 6 days) and the other half isn’t much better either. Fluctuating speeds and intermittent delays dampen your enthusiasm to browse. What’s even more annoying is the blank messenger window. Normally it shows one full screen view of online contacts but now with most kgpians relaxing in the comforts of their homes, the empty window makes me feel much more cheesed off. It wasn’t all that worthwhile in the end.

P.S: Typed 2 weeks ago. Troubling Net connection and now the nuisance-making computer caused the delay. Still damn frustrated.