Where have all the cyber cafes gone?

Like the old folk song goes, where have all the cyber cafes gone? There was a time when every street, nukkad and khopcha had a cyber cafe with a seedy guy sitting in a chair asking you if you wanted to use the “Internaat” for an hour. In recent times, with GPRS and now 3G , most youngsters seem to have forgotten the joys of these seedy places. This post is an attempt to educate many of those folks about the unknown pleasures of cyber cafes

Counter Strike / AOE marathons :

For those of the readers who have played on dial up modems, there is nothing as excruciating as the sight of your gun barrel moving in slow motion while the player on the opposite end of the world would put three shots in your head. As if this wasnt bad enough, one would have to listen to the excruciating sound of the modem as it made sounds like a pig caught in between the blades of an old PSPO fan. To remedy this, a lot of cyber-cafes offered a cheap alternative to online gaming. These seedy cafes are the places where some of our ace ninjas and war-hammers learnt their trade while others spent days labouring to understand Dunes / Dust

 

When you can see the bullet coming but cant move

 

MMS :

The Cyber-cafe was also the originator of one of the most important tools of sexual education in recent history, the famous MMS. Even though the MMS was supposed to be sent over mobile phones, it gained far more popularity over the net and was the reason for dozens of school kids to turn up at cyber-cafes , if only to watch that clip of Ashmit Patel and Riya Sen.The cyber cafe has helped bring enlightenment and true knowledge to many a kid.

Random Chatting/Social Networking :

For a generation, the words ASL bring back memories of chatting feverishly with strangers over Yahoo messenger or MSN Messenger, long before Skype and Gtalk burst onto the web. Later it was the omnipresent Orkut with people going to cyber cafes to find out how many “Fraand Requests” they had received and the “rubbish” written on their profile . The gradual disillusionment of people with Internet Louw is one of the saddest events in recent time.

For breaking out of this humdrum, cyber cafe owners need to do the following :

Cyber -Flix :

Start movie streaming services along with bar service provided, so people can watch #kvlt movies in seedy places and remember their college days . Preferably streaming of epic movies such as Gunda, Loha and other such famous movies should be done to increase awareness amongst the youth.

Online Marriage Ceremonies:

 

Online Weddings

 

What with people not finding the time to travel to other people’e weddings, this can become a new vocation where cyber-cafes link up using Videoconferencing to allow relatives to give E blessings to the married couples.Sometimes if the groom/ bride is too busy, even the marriage can be conducted online via Skype. This service can be extended to funerals and other family ceremonies as well. Totally environmental friendly and minimal quarrels. The only pitfall is that the grannies cant gossip and the jewellery / saris cant be displayed but hey,some sacrifices have to be done to stop global warming.

Pseudo Vacations:

For people who are too poor or too lazy to go on a vacation, cyber cafes can provide a service wherein they are made to view an online Google Maps trip of a country of their choice with occasional stops for drinks, loo breaks and snacks and also provide a set of photoshopped pictures to provide ample proof of having visited said city.  Another great opportunity to save the environment and tweak the noses of those crazy travel agencies / airline companies.

P.S: 1st pic taken from Ctrl Alt Del, the comic. 2nd pic taken from some random site as sadly Indians dont seem to Skype except if they are grad students who are saving dollars

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