'Everything in my mind had to be processed like a tweet'

Forty-eight hours after she was born, Inayat Kaur got a Twitter account. Twenty-four hours later, she had over a hundred follow­ers. The number kept growing; Mama Gursimran Kaur was as pleased as punch. Mother and daughter made instant headlines - the daughter for obvious reasons and the mother for tweeting about the baby right through the delivery. "People thought it was a publicity stunt," says 24-year-old Kaur who lives hi Jalandhar. "There were more nega­tive reactions than positive. But my Twitter space is where my friends are. I wanted to let them know ab­out it as much as I wanted to let my relatives know." When Gursimran Kaur was ten, she was spending close to five hours online everyday ("in those days of dial-up connections it was really expensive, so I used to go online after my parents went to bed," she laughs), freewheeling between ICQ, the instant mes­saging client that was the rage in those days and Internet forums. At 12, she became the youngest per­son in the world to become a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer; at 13, she was designing websites on a professional basis.

And so, when the social networking wave crashed upon Indian shores with Orkut in 2007, Kaur, now a freelance web designer rode it like a windsurfer. It was the same with Facebook. "But Orkut and Facebook were walled gardens, in the sense that you were restricted to your communities, groups and friends," says Kaur. "With the privacy paranoia, there was no chance of meeting new people." Sa Twitter was just what she was looking for. "Suddenly, you could follow all these strangers and they could follow you back and you could have rapid conversations that could go on for hours - it was so liberating!" she says.

Twitter provided the narcissistic validation that Kaur was looking for "It was great for the ego," she says. Initially, Kaur averaged about 70 tweets a day from her handle @LimeIce. "It was everywhere - my cell phone, laptop, Tablet and on my PC; it was integrated right into my browser. It got to the point when everything in my mind had to be processed like a tweet. Once, I was tweeting sitting in my bathtub!"

Kaur put her life real on hold. At parties, she would tweet about what was happening; at dinner-time, she would lift her head only to utter a dazed "What...?" when she was asked something; and she peeved her parents because even when she stayed with them, she was on Twitter all the time. "I was living a double life," she says. The rewards came in the form of more Twitter followers. She has more than 33,000 tweets.

The distinction between real life and virtual life is for old fogies, says Kaur. "I connect with my virtual friends more than my real friends," she says. "It is a deep relationship because it is based simply on what they think, unlike real life where you judge people based on how they look, dress and talk."

Twitter, she says, is a platform for the future. "Being a freelance web designer, it has given me lots of business opportunities. Also, it's a great tool to get instant feedback on pretty much anything."

A few weeks ago, Kaur consciously reduced her Twitter-time despite the pseudo-fame that being a tweleb (a Twitter celeb) brought her. Her followers went hysterical ("Where is @LimeIce?" "I miss @LimeIce") but Kaur didn't budge. "I spent more time tweeting about stuff that happened in my life than enjoying life itself," she says. "That said, Twitter has connected me with so many people that I can't just leave it behind. I met my best friend on Twitter, so I am merging the virtual world with my real world. That's something!"