Testimonial Categorization!

Having been on Orkut now for (the better part of) a year & a half now, I have noticed the spate of the rather meaningful testimonials that give a stunning insight into of the concerned person (all the sarcasm intended).

Some authors are poetic in their expression, preferring to write poems & sometimes songs in praise of the fellow. The colourful, sometimes-cryptic-sometimes-descriptive words sewn together to form lines & then stanzas ring out so rythmically & with such rhyming, that the heart soars when it reads! :P

Other authors prefer a more philosophically engaging way of expressing themselves, as they choose a recursive mode of writing. A generic example of such a recursion would be : "this is a blog post" OR " this is a testimonial" - a careful scrutiny of the statement reveals such hidden information & philosophical implications that you will be stunned by how so much can be implied in so little! :P .... Truly, brevity & recursion is the soul of a testimonial! :P .... The authors of such testimonials are usually philosophers, sears or computer programmers who understand the philosophical dichotomy of recursion!

Be it in poetry or prose, both testimonials have one thing in common - they are mass manufactured & copy-pasted/submitted/accepted in bulk - quite like that Archies card you gift some-one. Even that is a tad more original & authentic! This is not to say that the authors mean anything less than a sincere friendly testimonial - but many unfortunately haven't been blessed with the gift of the pen ;)

Then we have authors, who not satisfied with a mass-propagated material, make sincere attempts to be original & creative. While their efforts are valiant & appreciable, the result unfortunately is hardly flattering. But, atleast these guys make an effort to write something unique & different - its not just the end-result, but the gesture that counts.

And then, there's a category of committed love-birds, who choose to let out their feelings for each other via multiple testimonials, each of which read out like a Mills & Boons novel :P - okay mebbe not that bad! But its bad enough! Some of them divulge in such great detail the small nuances/idiosyncrasies and incidents that established their relationship, that would satisfy the apetite of even the most voyeuristic amongst us.

And finally, there are authors like me, who use a dozen adjectives & so-called "hi-funda" words (I like to think of them as illustrations of my linguistic mastery - yea, call me pompous & grandiloquent :P) .... Of course, it comes at a price - such testimonials are beyond the comprehension of the general orkutting masses and defy the very purpose of having a testimonial! People get more pissed when they receive such testimonials than when they have none - the reason? they don't understand half of it!

In the end, there are two ways of looking at it - that testimonials are tools for self-gratification and peer-approval on the internet in a manner that is as frivolous as it is dangerous/delusional OR testimonials are just a funny, light-hearted (and often copy-pasted/badly written) perspective on near friends/family that is meant NOT to be taken too seriously. Which one is the case, I leave it to you guys to decide.