The Night it Dawned on Me that I Should Blog

I decided to start a blog during a bout with insomnia.

Twisting and turning in bed, the mind saturated with too many things and soaring away to past and future one October night, I told myself I might as well log my first blog.

So I got up, frustrated and fuming over my inability to sleep, with the wind outside whistling its own tune and the rain making staccato notes on my window pane, and started the journey with the cold keyboard.

The opportunity actually beckoned few years back, when Weblog (or blog for short) was just new and the world was young and simpler. (At least from my point of view.)

Back then, though, I considered blogging as only for those with a luxury of time. I felt I had better things to spend my time on. What with three demanding kids and a strict commander-in-chief. (She imposes curfew and limits the happy hours; not that I begrudge her for it.)  So I watched the world go by, like a fence-sitter, as friends started blogging and I began reading their random thoughts and fathoming the nuggets of wisdom in them.

And now, yammering about sleep while composing my first blog, I paused and reflected on the need to connect, on that yearning to be with others, physically or emotionally.

Why do we reach out? Why do we send that invisible tendrils of hope into space so we touch others?  Is it because of the need to be accepted, to be loved, to be appreciated?

I remember Dr. Alfred Lanning in the movie "I Robot" starring Will Smith as Detective Del Spooner. Dr. Lanning, in one of his lectures, was asking why is it that robots, placed in a dark corner, actually bunch together instead of keeping to themselves.  (He actually said it a whole lot better; I am bad at recapturing quotes from memory.) His narration was juxtaposed with the scene where Spooner was opening the container vans where the decommissioned robots were "stored" and later massacred by the new NS5s.

Another movie, a touching one, is the 1999 hit "Bicentennial Man," where the android Andrew was played by Robin Williams as a robot who gradually acquired emotions and who wanted to be a man. In the end, he was granted his wish to be declared a "human being."

 In both movies, robots were shown to be acting more than just organized chunks of metal that are merely moving about based on their programming.  They exhibited traits of being "human."

Because being human is to have that welling feeling of affection for others and to willingly sacrifice for them, even to the extent of losing one's "life," much like the old robots who got butchered just to save Detective Del Spooner, or Andrew who opted to "die" just to show how "human" he was despite his alloy skull.

Being human is to have that desire to be with others and be there for them through rough and tough, though it means emerging the worse for wear.

In this age of the "Social Network," however, it is a pity that there are those who, though they do blogs and surf the Net, have already lost their "human-ness" and that capacity for togetherness, becoming more and more like the pompous, selfish jerks THAT have blighted the earth.