Virtually, a child at heart!

CHENNAI: Signing into your Facebook and Twitter accounts first thing in the morning, even before you find the time to brush your teeth, is now an undeniable ritual. But if you had logged into Facebook on Children’s Day this year or sometime during this week,  you would have begun wondering if you had accidentally stepped into a time machine. For, most people chose to update their profiles with their childhood pictures.Children’s Day was celebrated with much gusto on the social networking sites this year, taking off from the tepidly effective trend last year. People, old and young, changed their profile pictures to a photo of themselves in their childhood days. “I did it just for a change. I believe that I was more good looking in my childhood than I am now. So, why waste an opportunity to put up a cute photo of myself,” jokingly reasons Nambirajan Vanamamalai, who had a black and white photo of himself, looking surly, nothing like the happy-go-lucky, spectacled man that he is now.Just like it is for Nambirajan, Prashanth Krishnaswami is flooded with memories of his childhood, his house and folks who lived nearby. “I found a large stash of photos from my childhood while cleaning the house. I just posted one photo which everyone in the house thought was cutest,” he provides as an explanation for his naamam-clad younger self. For some of them, it was special, putting it up for just the day, and some of them maybe for the whole week. Some of them would do it every year and some of them just this. While Nambirajan says that he followed the trend this year because he was “in the mood for it”, Prashanth says, “I’ve done it for two years now. So, there’s no reason why I wouldn’t do it every year.”V K Neeraj, college student, says that he put up his childhood photo because he missed celebrating Children’s Day in the grand manner that he did as a kid. “How can we forget our good old childhood days, they are beautiful memories,” he reminisces. On the other hand on Twitter, people were not only putting up childhood photos of themselves, but were also busy trending #naughtybachpan, where they recalled some of their most favourite childhood memories. These memories ranged from playing doctor  to pouring ink on the principal’s head from the terrace as she sang the national anthem at the assembly. Singer Chinmayee, who put up a childhood photo of herself only at the end of the day tweeted, “Am recording. Will be a while before I put up (a) paapa pic. But since I love the baby me so much, I’m going to have it all week.” Well, like they say, growing up can be hard.