Have you ever noticed some dude with a hot babe at his side and a bunch of people hanging on to his every word? Or that one chick with a good looking boyfriend carrying her purse around as she maxes out his credit card. Well, that dude or that chick could be you. (No, not the babe or the purse carrier. It's hot babe and good looking boyfriend. If you were either why would you be on the Internet?) 

Most people believe making friends is hard. That you either have a knack for it or you don’t. That this is something you’re born with. Well, I am here to tell you that it’s not. At least not since God woke up Monday with a hangover after weekend partying and went, “Oh yeah, and the internet too”.

What follows is a basic guide to making friends and doing all that other stuff in the title. For the advanced course + a copy of How to make love like a Man, send a cheque of $39.99 to Kvlt Enterprises. If you are female, we’ll replace it with a copy of How to get your Man to blow his life’s savings on you. For our gay readers – sorry guys, too niche. Lesbians – send us pictures. Anyway, as soon as we’ve cashed it we’ll mail the stuff across to you pronto (kvltsite is not liable if the package does not reach you. Any allegations that we actually don’t mail anything and spend the money on beer and pizza are baseless and completely untrue). And to sweeten the deal, we’ll include a complimentary super awesome kvltblog tee .

A man once said, a friend in need is a friend indeed. Obviously that dude was talking out of his ass because a friend in need is a friend whose calls you shouldn’t be taking.

First, get on Orkut. Follow the instructions given in Orkut 101 - Vol 1 and Vol 2 to set up your profile. Now that’s done you need to start making friends. This depends on what your end motives are. In general there are two categories here

1. The Specialist
2. The Wholesaler

The specialist basically goes for quality over quantity. He is selective about who he wants as his friends and bases this upon good looks, intelligence, common interests etc. In real life you will wind up alone with copies of Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people”.

On orkut, you….are not alone. Just think of yourself as a connoisseur.  Now what you need to keep in mind is that even with the quality factor in play you need to cross the 100 mark in friend count. If you are not playing in 3 digits you will just be one of the millions of losers infesting orkut.

The Wholesaler just wants numbers. He wants to decimate everyone else through virtue of size alone. Where the specialist plays to a niche market, this bloke is the unstoppable juggernaught. Basically the wholesaler wants to be the one dude who was popular with everyone. We all know him, the guy who was gonna win the college elections until the opposing party’s goons broke his leg. After which he had the prettiest women in college hovering around him feeling sorry for him. And everyone signed his cast. Even the goons. And one day you got pissed off, tripped him and then said, “oh shit, sorry!” with a look of concern on your face while doing a jig mentally. Well, on orkut, you can be that dude (since it’s all virtual, no one to trip you either). The “700 friends” bit in the title is meant for you.

The Approach

This is where we introduce you to the wonder of orkut communities. By letting users create communities based on homogeneous traits (no, not gay people, you imbecile) you are assured of some overly keen people creating communities for every inane aspect of your tedious little life. Examples of such communities are – “people who take bus 534 to Mehrauli at 8:15am ever day”, “people who like mutton momos from that Tibetan Place near Brigade Road” etc etc

Such enthusiasm is typically displayed by annoyingly persistent people who have a pressing need to “stay in touch”. Even after you start ignoring emails and/or stop taking their calls. Find one of these people and they’ll be your St.Peter to Friend Heaven. These people are quite likely to have been class monitors who had a very serious attitude towards taking attendance, people who were first to raise their hands to volunteer for anything or people who wrote down the names of all their friends in notebooks adorned with lace and spent their free time drawing smiley faces alongside names. If you’re a working stiff (we suggest a quick visit to the men’s room to alleviate the tension. hyuk) look for those wankers who never get their fill of seeing enough of everyone in the week and keep saying stuff like “Why don’t all of us go out together on Sunday?? It will be like nice to meet outside work”. Locate these assholes and you’re on your way.

Across the communities of these insufferable bastards you can probably find everyone you ever met in life. The object of this entire exercise was that locating a few people or searching for communities is a whole lot easier than actually searching for every person you ever knew.

Now that this is done we’ll split the approach up: