Akash, who is now seeking counselling, heads into cyberbia for 12 hours a day to chat with his 35-year-old American girlfriend. Not surprisingly, he has dropped three successive years of his BSc. His divorced mother has to cope with monthly telephone bills of Rs 25,000 and today they are on the verge of bankruptcy.

Net-addiction and abuse among students has risen to alarming levels over the past year, psychiatrists say, heralding an altogether different brand of psycho-counselling in this IT-driven age. Students, especially in the 12 to 27 age group, are now so ensnared in the world-wide-web that self-concepts are getting bentout of shape, many waver on the fringes of reality and inter-personal skills are fast wilting, counsellors reveal. The two chief culprits: chatting and pornography.

Says Apurva Choudhary, a 21-year-od engineering student: ``When I sit at the dining table I involuntarily begin drumming my fingers on the surface as if on a keyboard. There is this nonsense of Online communities, which transport the human mind into a bizarre, unreal world. You get bonded to them and do not want to return to real life. A friend of mine met this girl on the Net.

They chatted for six months, fell madly in love and finally met. Today, the guy is in a major shock and on the verge of schizophrenia. He has to visit a psychiatrist regularly. He had fallen in love with a gay, who was posing as a girl!''

Things have come to such a pass that teenagers have actually begun to question the need to live in the real world, says Malathi Arunachalam, a counsellor. She says the number clients she sees for Net-induced problems has increasedsince June last year but has risen phenomenally since March 1999. ``Prices of computers have fallen, Net connections are getting cheaper and with schools introducing computer education, even the very young are getting hooked.''

She adds: ``This young girl was engaged to be married soon. She got introduced to chatting on the Net, where she met someone. In a few months, she was considering breaking off her engagement. She wasn't even sure if she'd be happy marrying someone. There are many youngsters who have begun to question real life relationships. For them, reality is no more what it is.''Arunachalam says she has a group of five collegians coming to her for counselling for the same problem. ``They are like zombies, it is almost impossible to hold a simple, regular conversation with them. Their faces have become inexpressive, their minds are in a daze and they feel comfortable and active only when on the Net. Life beyond the web no longer exists for them.''

Psychiatrist Dr Anjali Chhabria, points out thateven school children are now beginning to feel the effects of Net abuse. ``A young girl attempted suicide after an online relationship went sour. It is very easy for people to get hooked on to the Net as the anonymity gives you a certain feeling of comfort and confidence. But sooner or later, people become social recluses and refuse to interact even with their families,'' she explains.

Physiologically, though instances of eye-strain are unheard of, RSI (Repetitive Stress Injury) has begun to take its toll. Deepak, another 21-year-old from Santacruz, had to have his hand bandaged for three months due to RSI and couldn't take his engineering exams.

The unrestricted access to pornographic material on the Net has also corrupted young minds. In fact, about 20 per cent of websites are porn-related. Adds Arunachalam: ``One of my clients is a seventh standard boy who suddenly discovered porn on the Net. What he saw disgusted him so much, that he cannot behave normally today. He took to abusive behaviour.

Therewas a kind of anger in him and he lashed out at anything female, including his mother and sister. He started writing obscene graffiti in school, behaved abnormally all of a sudden with his classmates. Instead, he needed to be told things at the right time and in the right amounts, not to mention, in a proper way.'' In effect, the porn had shocked his young mind beyond comprehension. Twenty-year-old Manish, for instance, has 6Gb of porn stored on his computer! That's the private obsession of this otherwise straighter-than-some-others type of guy.

On the other hand, there are youngsters like Apurva, who are aggressive Net users. But he knows the perils of abuse so he uses the Net to learn voraciously. Today, at the age of 21, he has his own website development firm though his engineering course is in a mess due to a rut of ATKTs.The bottomline is, this new-age addiction has finally crept in and grabbed young lives with its chilly, destructive fingers. Look around you. Your colleague, best friend or son couldbe the next victim.