Future Now
The IFTF Blog
RP, rituals of intimacy, Delhi, 01/12/09
Family Background
RP (name withheld) is a twenty-two year old student studying at Delhi who provided us with a perspective on the impact of Internet and role of mobile technology in fostering friendship and relationships in the personal domain. RP was born in rural Haryana and since his middle school he has lived
at Chandigarh and has a conservative family background. In his fourth
year of college, he regularly visits his parents at Chandigarh and
maintains close contact using his mobile. RP’s father is employed in
the government and he has three other siblings and he’s the youngest
one in the family. His father gifted him a mobile when he secured
admission into his college and later a laptop as well. It is his
father’s dream that made him study engineering as he himself wanted to
become a doctor like his elder brother.
Our interview with him took place at the house of our research partner near his hostel at an engineering college in South Delhi and centred on questions of use of Internet for fostering intimacy and social relations with the opposite sex. We were specifically concerned with mapping how technology is furthering social relations or hindering development of intimacy between students living in dorms away from home and charting their use of digital media to maintain good relations with their family.
We were not allowed to visit his hostel but did gain extensive insights into how other youth and technology oriented students were using social networking sites such as Orkut to seek and make girl friends as there are very few of them enrolled in their own institutions. In such a scenario, the Internet opens an entirely new domain of fostering intimacy while the more conventional means of finding partners continue on a parallel basis.
Domain Specific Questions
RP has an active social life with other students in the campus and in another engineering college of Delhi where he studied prior to getting admitted in the current one. Using Orkut he has made numerous friends outside the campus and been deeply involved with a girl who is studying in Noida. Their relationship has been steady for the past eighteen months and after Internet chatting for nearly ten months, the couple started talking to each other and physically met. After some initial meetings their relationship grew stronger and the couple are now dating actively and meeting every fortnight in Connaught Place at Delhi.
This is not the only friend RP has made via the Internet and chatting room on the Internet, and he admitted having relationships with other girls prior to the current one. However, he admitted that the present one was a good one although he was not sure about the future as their case backgrounds were incompatible and there would be family opposition to their marriage if they became serious.
A typical day for RP includes classes and laboratory work from 8am to 5pm and thereafter some sports with the other students. In the evenings, he likes watching movies, listening to romantic melodies, dancing, playing cricket and indulging in computer games such as Counterstrike on the hostel LAN, and talking with his girl friend in the night. He dreams of the day when he would be able to buy a play station.
He mentioned that he was close to four other students in his hostel and with them he was inclined to discuss everything including how to manage intimacy and his family relationships. At another level, he opined that students in general were very competitive and self-centred at his college so he missed having true friends who would always be there in times of need: “they are batch mates and not friends.” He maintains close contact with other students using his mobile and the local area network of his hostel to post messages and on Orkut and gmail via the Internet. In his dorm he is well known for his collection of Hindi music and he often mixes music on his computer and sends them to his friends. He likes watching movies and often sees them with his girl friend and eat out with her or roam in the Central Park of Connaught Place. He mentioned that his girl friend lives with her parents and they do not yet know anything about their relationship. He often uses a friend of his girl friend’s as an intermediary to send cards, gifts, and flowers to his girl friend and likes to occasionally surprise her with visits to her college in Noida. In public he mentioned he would not go beyond holding her hands or placing an arm around her shoulder.
Opinion on Technology
Technology according to him has both good and bad uses and he narrated how sometimes his classmates would masquerade as a girl and approach others with friendship request in order to poke fun at each other. He was wary of putting too much private information on the net with so much hacking happening around on campus. He emphasized that nothing matched face-to-face meetings for maintaining relationships and especially those requiring privacy and intimacy. Although he uses technology a lot for managing his relationships and he would often download movies for his siblings and carry them home. He was very enthusiastic about photo sharing and video sharing and actively uses his mobile to take pictures and short videos that he likes sending to his girl friend and others. Other media he uses on a daily basis include newspapers, magazines like India Today, etc.
Future Insights
Talking about the future, he visualized that he would be working and earning well five years from now and married with children. He hopes that technology would be miniaturized in the future and his watch could become a multifunctional screen and computer.