So, I was checking my 100 years old Archies polybag. It’s got some greeting cards and letters (these are too valuable and too important for me and like a child I refuse to discard these). I exchanged these letters with few of my friends and cousins from the days when there was no concept of emails. This was about 12 years ago! Omg suddenly I feel old :-|
Then came the www revolution and we all started emailing. I had decided that I’ll keep writing letters because they had their own charm. I remember I exchanged my email id with my cousin and friends through letters. But soon fingers became too lazy to hold a pen and comfortable and soothing sound of tapping weirdly arranged keys took over. I used to wonder why the alphabets are arranged in this random fashion, why not our good old ABCD sequence where we all know that D will come before E and not under E.
Soon everybody got email ids and letters just vanished. Sometimes I miss the non-internet days and feel sad that only envelopes I open these days are credit card bills, phone bills, electricity bills :-|
I used to wait eagerly for postman and the sight of envelope in the letter box would bring an anxious smile on my face. Sigh!
I remember the transition from letters to emails. I used to check my inbox (@rediffmail) once in two weeks and I paid Rs.40 each time I opened it. In the beginning it was fun. Emails were long and descriptive and delightful. I would pay Rs 10 extra to take the printout so that I could show it to my parents. Over the years they started getting shorter and shorter. I actually preferred them longer. Then people who did not know us started emailing us. People who were trying to sell you online university degrees, or drugs to enhance body parts your gender doesn't have in the first place, or promises to transfer gazillions of dollars to your account on no account, or plead for help from 8-year-old Ethiopian orphans who never grew a day since the early nineties when they first started emailing us.
We hated these emails because they were not sent to us - these were not personalised. These were stupid forwards sent from the whole damn world to the whole damn world. We deleted it all. Then came gmail and the spam disappeared. So for all those jobless blokes who checked email just to delete spam and hence have-something-to-do, gmail was of no use.
But we continue checking. I am not even sure why we do it. I highly doubt that it’s in the hope that someone someday will write us a nice long email meant only for us. If we do get a personalized email and we reply, and we get a reply to our reply, and after that, there is not much to say anymore. But isn’t that why we were checking our email in the first place – to receive something meant for us? Didn't we delete like everything else??
We keep checking our email. Day in day out. At home, at work, during the weekdays, during the weekends. From our PCs, from our laptops, from our phones. We keep checking. Several email accounts. Several times a day. Like maniacs. And if we can’t, we get restless.
Can someone tell me - what the heck are we checking for? :-/
