We are all Facebook poets

On most days, my Facebook news feed resembles a kavi sammelan, a congregation of poets, a poetry festival. Sometimes I join in, adding to the wah-wah with 'likes'. When moved enough to make a comment, I often find myself at a loss: university education has only taught me to appreciate dead poets, without claps and whistles. I am as untrained in paying compliments to makers of verses as I am in receiving them. For a few moments, I type and delete, all the while speculating on the need for a new subject in the school curriculum, 'How to Pay Compliments on Facebook', something that would be honest, a word or phrase that would go beyond the awesome-lovely-gorgeous-brilliant standard fare. Like most fellow Facebookers, I most often fail. I copy the line that has affected me the most and put it in inverted commas. I know that it looks like a recycled gift, this return gift for a 'nice' poem, but my shyness and what now seems an incompetent vocabulary leave me helpless. And so I move on to the next post, the next poem.

Living in a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal, one without reading groups and 'intellectual communities' (that last one always in scare-quotes in my mind) I see Facebook as a virtual Bloomsbury Group for people like me. There's a Forster, and there's a Woolf, and there's a Keynes and we are their descendants, even if without their inheritance. Suddenly, the joy and the empathy of this self-contained universe leave me with inconsequential, PMS-like emotions, and I begin drafting my next Facebook update.