It was a bright Sunday morning I must say, the sun shone from the window right on to my face, waking me up from my sound sleep.I woke up with a start,it was ten past eight and stretched myself. Feeling the great desire for a cup of coffee,which I must say I was addicted to, I made myself a nice hot cup. Just when I was enjoying my morning coffee I heard the faint thud of something hitting the door of the house.That was the newspaper.I got up went to the door picked it up, opened the sports column straight, I always had the habit of reading the newspaper starting from the last page.There was this news about our cricket team winning a series abroad after 20 years, and since I was a keen follower of the sport, I was pretty happy with the news. I had missed most part of the series due to work, so sat down reading the post match review, a long article by a former cricketer praising the achievements of the captain, the same guy whom he had thrashed in the very same newspaper a couple of months ago for having lost a major world tournament.By the time I had completed it, it had been half past nine.

I switched on the computer as was my usual habit on Sundays, none of my friends were online yet, or so I thought. I opened the browser window and typed gmail.com on it. A page opened saying “server not found”. I wasn’t surprised,because the service my ISP provided was as unpredictable as the ex-cricketer whose article I had just read.So I switched off my router and turned it on again a few minutes later, same message again “server not found”. Then I tried other websites and what I observed was all google powered websites wouldn’t open and others opened properly. This greatly bugged me. There must be some problem in the ISP service, side I said to myself. There wasn’t a way a I could contact him that day,it was a Sunday. Frustrated,I called one of my friends to inquire if he was having similar problems, since the same ISP provided the internet service to him too.That guy was in sound sleep when I called him, he mumbled something that sounded like a hello and I immediately asked him to switch on the computer and try logging into gmail or any google powered site.He too tried and found the same results.Then I got too frustrated and cursing the ISP I shut my computer down, in the hope of it setting itself right in a while.

Feeling damn bored I returned back to the newspaper that I had not read beyond the sports page. I went through the rest of the pages briskly and finally came to the first page. It bore a great big headline,

“GOOGLE : Server Not Found”

“The software industry suffered a huge blow, as industry giants ‘Google’ shut down owing to huge financial losses resulting from a ……..”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was aghast at the news. It was several minutes before the impact of the news could sink in. This meant no more “google it”.

No more being casual about any information, no more leaving things till the last minute. No more Orkut, no more scraps, no more making new friends. Hell no more Gtalk, no more quick file transfers, no more chatting. No more being secure about your chats being saved.

It all began to dawn on me and with each thought on how dependent I was on Google I was ashamed of myself. I, who had always claimed to be independent, self-made, was now feeling ashamed of myself. I had sought help online whenever I needed anything, and the first place I looked was Google. I remembered all the fun things we did on Google. The first time I had searched my own name and found no results, and then decided to write my own blog. All the long lost friends I found through Orkut. The joy of meeting them after years. The amount of knowledge I had gained through chatting with friends on gtalk and going back to find all the chats saved for future reference. All this gone. The internet would be living hell without Google. The more I thought about it, the more I found it hard to believe that Google was gone. How I wished for it all to be a dream??

In fact at that very moment I heard an alarm go off somewhere. It did sound very familiar and the sound came from nearby. I, feeling really pissed off at the time on thinking the repercussions of the news I had just read, cursed my neighbour for his careless attitude of firstly setting an alarm at 10 in the morning and moreover not having the sense to turn it off. The alarm continued to ring for the next 10 minutes. It was odd since the sound was coming from somewhere near, not as far as the nieghbour's house. So I started searching my own place for it. As I came nearer my room the ring became louder. Finally I found the alarm and turned it off. It read 8:00 AM, and I was still in my bed At first I couldn’t understand what had just happened. Then it dawned on me. The whole thing was indeed a dream. I had just woken up and the newspaper hadn’t yet arrived. I climbed out of my bed and the first thing I did was to switch on my PC, type the URL “www.google.com”.

And when I saw the Google logo with the blue,yellow, green and red colors , man was I happy. On the other hand it made me feel sick when I realized the magnitude of my dependence on it.

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