OTMTATST

As with many people of my generation, I do a majority of my reading online. Some of my regular stops are rediff.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com, timesofindia.indiatimes.com, nytimes.com, newyorker.com, and of course wikipedia. Google.com itself qualifies as a stop, because that is the portal to many avenues. In fact, recently, as part of coursework, we had to submit a summary of any relevant and recent research paper. As I was scouring through a few of these papers, (pdfs obviously, and incidentally obtained through Google scholar) searching for a suitable and preferably easy one, I came across something funny. As you might know, every research paper has a section called 'References' at the end. One such paper had a similarly listing, and somewhere down the line was 'google.com'. Now, isn't that strange !

As I was saying, I read a lot online. Of late, I've started observing that I suffer from a new-age malady, the opens-too-many-tabs-at-the-same-time syndrome. Ever since Mozilla Firefox introduced tabs (which IE soon introduced too), there no longer is the cumbersome problem of having too many windows clustering the taskbar. Whenever there is a link to some new articles or information, I can very conveniently open it immediately in a new tab, as opposed to coming to that place later on.

Because of this, I tend to sometimes leave the original article unread and go on to read the offshoot. I also maniacally keep opening multiple tabs whenever I see newer links, which I feel might be worth a read. So much so that my Internet Explorer has crashed a few times. So now I limit myself to about 15 odd tabs. Opening so many tabs is still alright if I am going to read all what I have opened. But no ! Nowadays, I tire easily, and after some time I start feeling crushed under my own enthusiasm. Neither do I have the energy to read all the open stuff, nor do I have the heart to close it. So I have started hibernating my comp now, with all the tabs and the windows in minimized state. This continues for days on end. Whenever I want to check my mail or read some fresh news, I open a window anew, with tabs anew. It is the same old story. The stuff piles up, till one day the browser or the OS crashes. This actually is a relief for me because I know I never would have read all that stuff.

Strange malady, this is. It is time some doctor came up with a latin name for it.