A handwritten relic of the past or a reincarnated online avatar - Slam books that defined school life in the 90s are making a comeback of sorts in ways more than one It was something that youngsters in the US growing up in the late '70s and '80s resorted to,to either paint scenic descriptions of their high school and junior college days or to just bully the not so popular kids in the class. The fad caught the fancy of youngsters in India only in the mid-nineties and Slam Books,as they are popularly known,became the mainstay of students' lives far before the internet and social networking burst onto the scene. There is something remarkably old world about them, says 23-year-old web developer Shruti Roy. It was all about describing high school crushes,and secret desires,as well as trashing the snobby kids,without actually beating them up. That was social networking before the internet. It has been called a cross between the personal diary,passing notes,and the more recent blogs,but this toy of the nineties did not have the most popular of beginnings, in the 70s. Its existence has been traced back to as early as the 1940s when young girls in the pre and post World War world in America made notes in little diaries about their boyfriends and husbands who had been serving in the US army and exchanged them with friends. While this could roughly be called as the predecessor of modern day slam books,the actual origins of the modern day version could be traced to the 70s when students in colleges started writing nasty things about either the most popular or the unpopular students! Hence the name: Slam Book. Well,filling up a slam book for me was more about finding out about my friends' crushes,and who liked whom. Basically,all high school stuff, says Prajakta Deshpande,a student,adding,However that was when I was in high school. Now with social networking invading our lives everyday,the entire charm of actually sitting down and penning our thoughts seems to be vanishing into oblivion. And while this is a topic that has been debated ever since networking sites caught the fancy of even the college crowds,it is something that shopkeepers like Jayesh N,who has a franchisee outlet for a prominent card shop,refuse to believe. They are still popular, he insists,before adding,We have them in prices ranging from Rs 45 to Rs 400. And they come with a wide variety of options like handmade paper ones,or ones with interesting designs and so on and so forth. A new concept that has however come up in lieu of the traditional slam books is the online slambook. Websites like slambook.org and slambook.com allow users to create customised slam book pages that they can share with their friends. I feel the concept of online slam books is pretty innovative, says 14-year-old Nikhil Bharadwaj. The best part is you can create a personalised page for all your individual friends with questions that are specifically related to them. After that,if the entire idea of having an actual book still appeals,one can take printouts and make sure that the things written have a typeface that looks like an individual's handwriting,and then make a scrap book out of them, he adds. What's in the book? One can make a slam book by using a normal spiral bound book and writing out all the questions to be asked on one page and asking friends to fill in their responses by numbering the subsequent pages Online portals like Slambook.com and Slambook.org allow users to do the same in a much more cost effective way. A perfectly bound slam book can be used as a coffee table book or you can take it to parties and have friends and acquaintances fill it out. Psychologists say that reading their children's slam books can actually help parents raise them better.
