The Hindu Business Line : Call to pranks

Reacting to the near-deathly silence in our newsroom, older colleagues reminisce about the newsroom din of the good old days – rattling teleprinters, yellings across the room to reporters, noisy exchanges with the production folk...

Younger colleagues, fresh out of wonderfully boisterous college days, wince at the noiselessness. Makes you long to tear down the walls of silence around self-contained workstations humming with computers, emails and Internet.

Or, better still, take a leaf out of the “Random acts of silliness” perpetrated by groups of youngsters across the US. Ellen Gamerman writes in the WSJ, “Unlike many pranks of the past, today’s most popular stunts don’t feature one prankster at the centre of the action, but hundreds of people in on the joke. Using the Internet to organise, pranksters create highly choreographed public spectacles that aim to entertain passersby, or at least take them by surprise.”

They range from pantless subway rides in New York to fake-blood smeared zombie walks in San Francisco, group dancing to music that no one else can hear! Needless to say, these also make for great Youtube moments.

But at the heart of it all seems to be a yearning for a sense of community feeling, far from the “monotony of urban life… and less-than-exciting office lives.”

Ari Lerner, a young software engineer in Los Angeles who runs a prankster group called GuerilLA, says: “We’re finding ourselves more and more disconnected. We all sit at our computers and we forget there’s a sun outside. It’s a reaction to that.”

Malathi Ramanathan