Have modem, will travel

I confess, I was never e-friendly. True, I've used e-mail. Only because it was the one way I could afford to stay in touch with my rather...

I confess, I was never e-friendly. True, I8217;ve used e-mail. Only because it was the one way I could afford to stay in touch with my rather far-flung family. That was before I started being charged for sending personal e-mail from the office computer. But that8217;s another story.Everything changed on my recent trip around the world. Or should I say around the World Wide Web. I got to America and found that everyone was hopelessly but happily enmeshed in it. I felt left out. The final straw was when my nine-year-old nephew Siddhartha downloaded information from it to do his homework. Just to humiliate me.

I was now determined to get 8220;on the internet.8221; That was going to be my new trip. The first stop turned out to be Seattle, Washington. There, my mud-and-grass world began to merge with the electronic one. My host was Rakesh Mathur, the man who started Junglee.com the second netware company with a name reminiscent of the Shammi Kapoor hit. The other one of course is Yahoo!

Junglee.com had developed acomparative shopping package for the internet. It sifted through the internet to find out where to buy something at the best possible price. Rakesh and his colleagues recently sold into the giant internet retailer Amazon.com and became millionaires overnight. Obviously, I told myself, it pays to know your internet.

Rakesh and his netware entered public consciousness with a bang when he posed for the cover of Wired magazine in a black gown ensemble, jewellery and all. This wasn8217;t about a cross-dresser coming out of the closet. It was a brillinat PR move dreamed up by Rakesh8217;s collegues after they sacked their agency, I might add. This was the background: The woman CEO of another US-based netware company had appeared in a similar get-up in a million-dollar ad campaign promoting her firm. She came in for severe criticism for trying to use sex appeal to sell her wares, so to speak. Rakesh spoofed these ads. It clicked because he made it entirely relevant to his company8217;s product: Everything he wore waspurchased at bargain prices using his internet shopping package. This photo opportunity set off a flood of media coverage that has not abated since.

Rakesh8217;s story got me quite excited about the web. I was ready to take the plunge. I moved from site to site, trying to discover what it was that made the citizens of this new world click.

I 8220;met8221; collectors of 19508217;s vintage horror comics at the auction site Ebay. They were quite a big bunch. Just imagine: On a single day this month there were nearly 500 Ebay auctions just in the category of 19508217;s horror comics. And more than 25,000 for comic books over all.

But shopping, as I discovered, wasn8217;t the only thing people were doing on the net. Star Wars devotees who hadn8217;t yet made it to the cinema hall to catch the latest Lucasfilm offering, consoled themselves with Star Wards Fan Flicks with titles like 8220;Beer Wars8221; 8211; at members.aol.com/moseisleym/sw-main.html.

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Other movie buffs were actually watching their favourite films for free on the Net. SavingPrivate Ryan, Antz and Shakespeare in Love were some of the titles available illegally of course.

Elvis fans were busy interacting with the spirit of the pelvis man at the Tickle Me Elvis site auschron.com/mrpants/elvis.html. And people confronted with such weighty problems as what to have for dinner were turning to the Random Food Generator for suggestions atu.com.au/ andrewsc/rff.html.

Finally there was cyber-romance. Love blossoming on the Net. A scenario made famous by New York 192 and Shop Girl, the chat room code names of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the hit film You8217;ve Got Mail.

My dizzying tour of the World Wide Web finally came to an end. Heading back home on Cathay Pacific, I read in the papers that Cathay pilots were threatening to go on strike very soon. So far they had restricted themselves to venting their spleen on their own special website. Sort of an e-strike, if you will. I prayed that they would hold off a little longer before moving out from the electronic world into myairpace. So that, like Romesh Gunesekera in The Sandglass, I too could assert with conviction that 8220;I know how to live with only a modem and a mouse.8221;