The Shrinking world

Is it a small world or what?
I was reading a historic romance coupla days back and there was a mention of steam engine in it. The characters were amazed by the speed at which it travelled... My God!!! All of 12 KM per hour.This mode of travel was too fast and everyone was sure it would never catch on. But there were many exclamations on how fast they could reach the different places in England. It was making the world small.

From the 1800s to now, the world has been shrinking shrinking shrinking... until there is hardly anything left of it.

Not so long ago,calling to US from India was a major event. You were s'posed to call up the trunk like and book a call and then when it got cleared you had to scream from this side to let the other person hear. There was always a lag and the connection was tenuous at best.
Now we can actually see and talk to people tens of thousands of miles away at the click of a button.

Communities like the orkut and ryze and chat rooms have made life much more easier. I joined (very reluctantly) one such communities recently at the urging of a friend and it was amazing. so many of my friends, schoolmates, acquaintances were also members. Got in touch with friends whom I had feared lost forever.
In fact a pal in one of the communities turned out to be working in the same company as I and we had been communicating for months before we even realized that :-)

One of my friends in my masters class was a chat pal I had lost touch with 2 years back.

How many times have the mails we sent, come back to us through circuitous routes, colecting a list of common friends and acquaintances in the "To" field.

I was able to realize the effect of this phenomenon, when a college friend's brother in US mailed me asking if I knew a person. That person turned out to be my ex-boss, who apparently shared an apartment with a friend of my friend's brother.*phew* Did u get the connection?
Hearing my ex-boss' company,it stuck my friend's bro that I might know her... and what dya know??? Of the 75000 people who work for my company.. I did know her.

Each of us, I am sure, has thousands of such stories to tell.

While everything does have its flip sides, I find myself falling deeper and deeper in love with all these technologies and thingamajicks.After all how else can an eskimo and bedoiun end up becoming best of friends