Going forward

Over the past few days I have been getting a lot of text messages on my mobile phone wishing me and my family well for the New Year. These have ranged from simple greetings for 2008 to screen-loads of text to make sure all bases are covered, from my health to my wealth, my love, my life and, in one funny one, even my eating habits. And all along there has been a general air of bonhomie and a surety that each one of those smses are forwards, none original and custom-composed for me. In fact, I got quite a few repeats, with the same message from different people just seconds apart, showing how what goes around inevitably comes around again within a very short span of time.

Forwards are like that. I get plenty of them on email, too, and have set up a nice filtering system that weeds out many of the ones that send me a little non-compos with their text and even their pictures. Today, in fact, a colleague sent me a mail that showed a rather strained gentleman contorting his face to bite his own nose. I never thought it was possible. More important, I never thought that anyone would even want to try it. And why would they do it with people watching long enough to photograph each stage of the seemingly very painful process? It has me wondering why people do things like this. And wondering even more why people would expect me to be even remotely interested in seeing it happen.

Perhaps the more common forwards in this country are the religiously referenced ones. At almost any time of the year a picture-heavy mail – usually a Powerpoint presentation - will clog up my official inbox and prevent other more important communication coming through. It is most irritating, but since it invariably involves one or the other of our 33 million or so gods, one cannot protest too loudly or too vehemently without upsetting someone along the way. But I really am not religious, I say mildly, and then delete the mail after a cursory scan. Sometimes, when it is my favourite God, Ganesha, I might just open the mail to check what the pictures are; they can be really cute and I occasionally will lower my strictly retained walls and forward them to close friends.

But there ere other mails that will never wing their way through cyberspace to my friends, family and assorted acquaintances. These are the ‘send-this-to-at-least-seven-people-to-see-a-favourable-change-in-your-life-in-just-five-days mails that have come through a convoluted series of forwards into my mailbox, usually sent to me by someone who not only should know better than to believe this kind of guff, but also should know that I hate getting it. What I truly deplore, however, is the kind of mail that tells me about the courage of some little girl who died, or some little boy who saved his world from sure destruction of some kind. For some odd reason I could probably explain if I wanted to dig into my own psyche, I can never resist reading these stories and, even as they make me feel a kind of ‘awwwwwwwwwwwww’ feeling, I am disgusted at myself to check out what is blatant emotional blackmail of sorts.

And then there are the sms forwards that I abhor with every synapse. These are the incredibly male chauvinistic, sexually loaded, often smutty messages that purport to be funny. They are far from it. Just horrible reflections of minds I prefer not to know exist in my life.