The Fwd: Saga

Yesterday, i overheard two colleagues of mine discussing over lunch, One person said, I have crossed the 3000 mark, his friend exclaimed. waah yaar thats great, i am trying so hard but am not able to cross 2500, and you have crossed 3000!!!. I thought they were discussing about some work in their functional area, but to my surprise during the course of the conversation i could make out that what they were talking about was not anything related to work but about the no. of Fwd's they had received in all. The morsel of food which i had just put in my mouth, couldnt go down beyond my throat.
The first thing i did when i came back to my seat was to open my gmail and check the unread forwards that were lying there, my unread messages count showed about 1500 mails, then there were those whose subject line i had found interesting enough to open and read, I had actually never even bothered to delete them from my inbox, what with sites like Gmail offeiring unlimited space, you dont even have to bother to organize and clear your clutter, I had never imagined that people actually will be keeping count of the number of fwd's, I didnt know if that could be termed as a hobby, "collecting forwards".
Maybe some years down the line, these will get the status of antique pieces of art, and people will have auctions organized for these fwd's, Auction Houses will fix prices and there will be people who would have specialized in their valuation, depending on how old the fwd is or the origin of it, or maybe the subject will determine the price at which they will be sold, These fwd's might even become a status symbol, socialittes might even show them off to their so called friends at their Page 3 parties. It might even so happen that in one of these parties, you see a high profile person flaunting his / her recent purchase of an age old fwd, and at the bar the old person sharing a drink with you actually looks at them and smiles, a wicked smile. you feel curious and ask him the reason for his smile, and he looks back at you with his stern cold eyes, comes closer and whispers in your ears, "I had actually started that fwd chain when i was a school going kid and today its the oldest fwd message available on net, all my life my earnings have been through royalties that i have been earning on it. You might even see your kids having a subject on fwd mailsand remembering names of some people who started these chains just like we remember the names of great people of our yester years. and a 24 hours fwd mail TV channel giving you unlimited coverage on whats happening in the world of fwd's, they might even have the fwd index. whose movement would be tracked regularly. We might even have a regulatory authority for forwards, which will decide which forward has to be circulated and which is not for public viewing.
If people can find it interesting enough to keep sending forward chains to all the people they know as a time pass, and even develop it as a hobby, then its not too late before we see the above imaginations of mine turn into reality.
When I was a kid, my grandmom had once told me a story of a shephard who faked the roar of a lion twice just to irritate the village folk, unfortunately the third time when he did come face to face to a lion and called for help, the village folk didnt respond to his call thinking he was trying to play a prank on them, and eventually he got gobbled up by the lion. Similarly, in the recent past there has been a flood of such fwd message chains of people asking for help or trying to help someone, most of the receipents might just not even open it or even delete it from their inbox, trying to think its fake, If the click of a send button would determine my fate or the number of people I send the fwd to is going to determine the kind of life partner i am going to get, then I would rather construct a temple for my laptop and offer my prayers to it, as it seems to be more powerful than God, talking about God, I dont know if God uses mathematical models to determinethe relation between the Consequences of one's actions and the actions in his pevious births, but imagining that he does is more rational to me than thinking that he would decide on whom to confer his blessings depending on the number of people to whom you and me have fwded his picture.
Personally speaking, I have nothing against the fwd chains i receive, or the people who send those to me, infact i would rather pray and hope that it does help someone in their times of need, its the best way a person can communicate his personal views to a larger audience, with a high level of confidence of getting read. and a minimum probability of people questioning his sanity or rationality, as there is again the fear of earning the wrath of 'lady luck' or even 'Mr. Fate'. E-mails and sms have taken over completely, its really rare to receive a letter unless it isnt official and even in that case its printed, the other day my mom was showing me the first letters that dad had written to her during his first posting after marriage and she became so nostalgic, as if she was reliving those moments, If someday my son / daughter comes and asks me about my first love letter, i think i will have to open my inbox in gmail, search through the clutter and show him one of the mails that i had received a long time back, infact, some time back, i needed to change my cell phone, i was not ready to do so, as i really loved some very romantic sms's that my girlfriend had sent to me (later i came to know that they were some fwd's that she had received from somebody else), all i am saying is there's no genuinity. If you receive a forward from a friend, who has sent the same message to so many others in his / her contact list, do you feel happy that he / she remembered you, how is somebody supposed to react. There's this cousin of mine who has just finished college, i had met him after a period of two months or so, and when I asked him, why he had not written to me or called me in a long time, his reply just bowled me over, he said,"hey come on, didnt you receive all those fwd's that i had sent you", I didnt know how to react, How am i supposed to know which fwd meant, "How are you" and which one meant "I am fine", and then there was this friend of mine who suddenly called me up one day and started complaining that i didnt have the minimum courtesy to acknowledge and appreciate the fwd's she sent, I didnt know i was supposed to, so from that day i started sending thankyou messages whenever i received a fwd from someone, and one day another friend of mine said, dont you have anything better to do or write, why do you keep sending so many thank you messages everyday, well, i never complained for all the stupid fwd's she kept sending me.
I have always believed that, a simple line like, "Hi, How are you doing" means a lot to many people than some fwd message, so lets not get into that mode, moreover, it takes so much server space, and even time to send and receive and send again, increases the work load on all the network administators in all the companies, so companies have to go for more servers, which increases their fixed costs, thus bringing down their profit margins, and thus affecting our appraisals as well, creates business for companies coming up with Firewalls, and some mind work for all the geeks who waste their brains just to find a way out of that firewall, thats the macro view on the fwd chains, somewhat similar to the food chain i had studied in my fifth grade.
Good Bye and Adios

Fate or Misfortune

Last Saturday, I along with a few of my friends went for the movie, "The curious case of Benjamin Button", it was truly an awesome movie, everything about that movie was perfect, especially, there was this once scene which I truly believed was shot in a very striking manner, the scene which shows the various acts which preceded and were responsible for Cate Blanchett’s accident, and how it could have been avoided had it not been for any of these acts, that scene kind of made me sit back and introspect the role that a delay of a minute or two can make to one’s life, the kind of significance that the term “If only” has in everybody’s life.

Call it fate, or misfortune, but I experienced the same kind of feeling the very next day, when I rammed into an auto rickshaw and had a completely damaged car which literally had to be towed away to the nearest service station, and I just cant stop wondering “If only”.

We were returning back home after having enjoyed a game of bowling, we were supposed to go for our band practice, but due to some reason both of us decided we rather return back home, on our way back home, we stopped at the mall to make some general purchases, as we were coming out of the mall, I noticed two or three people with ice-creams in their hands, out of nowhere, I got this urge to have an ice-cream, it was a hot Sunday afternoon, and my friend also kind of liked the idea, he then suggested that we go to “Corner house” an ice-cream parlor which is a few blocks away from the mall, this was not at all in the scheme of our plans, and I was kind of apprehensive about going there, as the traffic in that area was terrible, and to find a parking space there would be as difficult as trying to find the door to Heaven, but still, the urge to have an ice-cream was so bad that I consented, and we were on our way to Corner House, going there, finding our way through traffic, finding a suitable place for parking, enjoying our ice-cream and starting back from there all took a decent 45 minutes. Once we were done with it, we started our journey back home, on our way back home, my friend suggested we invite another mutual friend to our place to spend the afternoon, I was looking forward for a nice afternoon nap, so again I was kind of apprehensive about it, and I asked him if that friend could visit us sometime in the evening, but this time again he was able to convince me, and so we agreed to wait for him somewhere on the way, we waited for him for ten to fifteen minutes, and finally started our journey back home, fully confident that finally we will be back home by at least 03:30 in the afternoon, and I will be able to have my nap, which I was looking forward to.

Just five minutes away from our house, I turned into the service road, God knows why I did that, as usually I prefer to be on the highway, till the final turning to our house, anyways, I took this service road, the speedometer was showing a decent 50kmph, just then I notice this auto rickshaw coming out of nowhere trying to cross the service road and get onto the highway, I honk my horn and apply brakes, but my vehicle is completely out of control as it starts skidding, now why did that happen!!! Oh yes, that service road was laid just a few days back and there was still some mud on that road, it was damn new, and probably that was what prompted me to take that in the first place, anyways, my vehicle was not in my control, I applied the brakes but it just didn’t respond, I saw that auto rickshaw right in front of my eyes, maybe he also saw me and if he would have wanted we could have averted the collision, but he was in no mood to back off, and I was not in control even if I wanted to, I turned the steering wheel in the last minute but it was too late by then, the right wing of my car rammed into the rear part of his vehicle, my car stopped a little distance away, right portion of my car was in shatters, fortunately me, both my friends and the driver of that vehicle were safe, nothing happened to any of us, not even a single scratch on our body. What followed was a few hours of trying to throw blame on each other by then a good number of onlookers had gathered, who had nothing better to do on a Sunday evening, but to stand in the middle of the road and enjoy two people who were literally in shock but still trying to find some rational part of the brain functional to be able to discuss and negotiate and find an amicable solution for the situation that was in hand, finally a settlement was reached, wherein I had to bear the expenses for the repair for his vehicle, what with the owner of the vehicle being a local goon, and he having a lot of loyal people ready to lay their hands on anything and everything they could get especially me and my friends, we were completely cornered, and had no other choice, but to accept their demands, But the point here is
The thoughts that bothered me that night, and it was, If only I would have gone for the practice, or if only we had not gone for either the purchases at the mall or the ice-cream, or may be if only we wouldn’t have waited for that friend of ours, or maybe if only we wouldn’t have taken the service road at all then maybe this thing would surely have been averted, call it fate or call it misfortune, the vehicles owner being a local goon, and the incident happening just 5 minutes away from where we live is surely the curious case of my fate.