Check-in' the mail?

July 1998

So I’m sitting in the canteen writing a letter (yes, you read that right!) when a second year guy approaches me.

"Hi Sayesha, what on earth are you doing?" He grinned.

"Bharatnatyam." I wanted to say, but smartass freshies really get it (and I’d had enough and enough of being ragged), so I decided against it.

"I'm writing a letter." I said.

"You're writing a letter?"

"Yeah."

"To whom?"

"Santa Claus." I went in my head, then changed my mind again.

"Mom and Dad."

"You're writing a letter to your Mom and Dad?" He was extremely amused.

"She's writing a letter to her Mom and Dad!" he hollered to two of his batchmates who also decided to join in and examine “the specimen who wrote letters to people”.

"Why don't you email them?"

"They don't have email."

They looked at each other.

"Besides, letters have their own charm." I added.

"Letters have their own charm... wah wah!" they guffawed.

"You know what, Sayesha? I bet you'll stop writing letters by the time you make it to second year."

"I'll NEVER." I said indignantly.

("Never stop writing" I meant, not "never make it to second year".)

"I will prove you wrong, dude!" I made a resolution.

Erm, I stopped writing letters by the end of the first semester.

My excuse? Everyone did. Dad had got email, it was faster and hassle-free, and I could do it in the middle of a boring class. I emailed him every day. Then every week, then every month. I believe I’m still at every month.

Back in the days of letters, we checked our mailboxes once in a few days. The world then moved online and there were fewer reasons to check our mailboxes. Mailboxes became almost useless, in other words - spam central. And we got crazily emailing. In the beginning, it was fun. Emails were long and descriptive and delightful. Over the years, they started getting shorter and shorter. We actually preferred them that way. Then people we know stopped emailing us, and people who did not know us started instead. 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 pleas for help from 8-year-old Ethiopian orphans who never grew a day since the early nineties when they first started emailing us. Sometimes we ‘paid it forward’ by sending them to people we dislike.

We hated these emails because they were not sent to us - they were not personalised. They were stupid forwards meant for the whole damn world and sent 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 some day will write us a nice long email meant only for us. If that was the case, why do we look at the personalised emails that bhoole bhatke come to us and go, “Shit! Do I have to reply to this?” We read it and put it aside because we don't know what to reply, even though it was probably why we kept checking our email. And even if 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??

Yesterday I made a resolution, to make better use of email. To email properly and reply properly, and perhaps devote an hour or so every weekend to what Rachel (F.R.I.E.N.D.S) calls "catching up on correspondence". Enough is enough. I can't keep checking my email when I don't expect to send any out - it's downright ridiculous!

Strange… We want to be remembered, but we don't remember.

But 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.

Sometimes I wonder - what the heck are we checking for?

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