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