Digitally distinguished

The year-end holiday season brings several parties in its wake.

The year-end holiday season brings several parties in its wake. Hosts show off their glitziest chandeliers to guests in stylish kurtas who make sure their imitation Rolexes dazzle on their wrists. During these festivities there are many introductions and many hopeless promises to stay in touch.

In this digital age, I don8217;t trust such guests with their business card collection tucked away. The first thing they would do upon heading home would be to 8216;google8217; your name to check on you. If you are a nonentity in the worldwide web, you wouldn8217;t be worth another phone call. On the other hand, if you have an eminent internet existence, you would surely be hearing from someone8217;s cousin twice removed.

I feel somewhat safe. I don8217;t have a name that sounds unique. My Palghat ancestry ensures I had no last name while my first is prefaced by a couple of initials that confounds search engines, lending me anonymity. The curious ones would now have to plod through 50 pages of search results only to come across an uneventful piece I had written five years ago about the excessive weight of children8217;s schoolbags.

Unable to contain my curiosity, one day I 8216;googled8217; my name to find out what dark facts it revealed. Proponents of search engines call this act 8216;vanity searching8217; or 8216;ego-surfing8217; though pandering to my ego was farthest from my mind. This query revealed several suspects masquerading under my name. One was a persevering historian and another, a distinguished musician. There was this college student in Mumbai and a heart surgeon who lived somewhere in the Middle East. No criminals thankfully went by my name 8212; would be out of question. Determined to be digitally distinguished, I decided to build my own website, hoping that my name would now rank high up in the search results. Posting several of my articles, I peppered the site with keywords like 8216;writer8217; and 8216;freelancer8217;, so curious partygoers could relate to my conversations and zoom in.

Ego-surfing one morning, I discovered an article written by me posted in a forum. The misleading 8216;author8217; 8212; another person with my name, but a different email address and digital existence had embarked on a cut-and-paste frenzy without acknowledging the real namesake author.