State of the reunion

Ego-surfing has some interesting side-effects. While indulging in this relatively harmless, and occasionally rewarding, exercise, i found with some alarm that there was a resident of upstate New York who had my name, well almost, and, curiously enough, was of the same age. As a long-time resident of Bangalore, this was worrisome. I couldn't be in two places at the same time.I wasn't inclined to either; it's tough enough being in one place at one time.
A colleague deduced what could have happened: an online profile created sometime ago may have led to this dual existence. After some determined remembering, i realised that's exactly what had happened. I'd created an account on reunion.com sometime ago when transiting through New York and had given my local address to log on to this website and find some old friends. That website has morphed into mylife.com and that's where my e-avatar lives.
People-searching is big business. Companies promise to find your long-lost family and friends, and have monetised this business. With no empirical evidence, i'll hazard a guess on the main motivator - to catch up with friends, mostly classmates from school, college and workplace, in that order. That says something about the workplace. Finding rich relatives and establishing kinship in the fervent hope of a financial windfall could be a close second.
In the recent past, i've been getting friend requests on social networking sites from people who fall into two broad categories. It's a pleasure to renew the acquaintance of some, yet not so with others but e-tiquette dictates one befriends them anyway. Some new-old friends talk about catching up, leisurely lunches, reunions, etc.
Lunches are no problem - one has to eat at some point in a day and any awkwardness over breaking bread can be swiftly covered up in wholly unnecessary trips to the buffet spread. Catching up over coffee is particularly welcome because you can make a quick exit by simulating smses of office meetings that cannot be ignored. Reunions are the mother of all nostalgia, a double whammy of mass meetings and disjointed memories.
If you have studied, at the very least, in one school, one Plus-2 college, one degree college, one post-graduate course and worked in four organisations, you're likely to have eight sets of friends. If all these groups want to have annual reunions, you're going to spend a lot of time meeting people you may want to avoid. I believe in online groups: they allow you to keep in touch but reduce the possible pain of face-to-face meetings. Reunions once every five years are good, every 10 better. Twenty-five is distinctly appealing. Fifty is the jackpot. Like the golden jubilee celebrations of my school in the near future. Will i attend? I'd like to, considering i'm unlikely to be around for the centenary.
I'm not against the idea of meeting old classmates. In fact, we had the most wonderful bees saal baad of the Class of '87 a couple of years ago. We're coming up to the silver jubilee and there's some chatter how we can make it a memorable event. It's just that the constant catching up leaves you living in the past and wallowing in nostalgia. As Frank Zappa put it memorably, "It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice - there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia." (Hat tip to my friend Udhay who slipped this quote at the end of his annual note to all his friends which snapshots his year gone by and bundles wishes for the year ahead. It's a delightful way of keeping in touch.)
The small, but rather sobering, consolation is that the longer you live, the number of reunions becomes progressively fewer - there won't be too many people to reunite with!