Holy Spam

Even in this age of e-mail, I somehow have retained the interest of eagerly waiting for the postman to see if he has any letters for me. He did have one for me today. It was from a distant cousin of mine. Well, I was perplexed. Why in the world did he feel like posting me a letter after God knows how many years or maybe even eons. Well, whatever it be, a letter is a letter, I told myself and hurriedly opened it.

The contents read like this

OM Ganeshaya Namaha

This is a blessing from Lord Ganeshji that has already traveled 12 times around the world. Please make 5 copies of it and send it to your loved ones. Good Luck will follow. Otherwise harm will befall you....

( followed by 2 stories of how some people ignored it and they ended up overnight paupers or even worse met with an accident....blah..blah..blah )

I was wild with rage. I cursed this cousin of mine. Threw the letter into a corner. Huffing and puffing, I returned to my laptop.

NEW MAIL !!! announced my email software at the bottom right hand corner of the laptop screen. It was from another of my friend. The subject line read "Don't ignore - Please read". I opened it to face the same useless stuff again. Phew !!! It was all the same stuff except that the deity was Lord Hanuman. Gods who were sowing luck across the country through letters have now taken to e-mail as a way of reaching their devotees faster.

Gosh !!!! I suppose it is only Indians who can contribute such spam unto themselves. With e-mail, you are not limited to 5 copies. Make as many as you like. Pollute as many a inbox as you can. Even the messages have directions of how soon luck will come hunting for you....

• 5 people ( minimum ) - Good news in 10 days
• 10 people - Good news in 5 days
• 15 and more - Within 1 day.

Mails are not restricted to Gods/Goddesses from the Hindu pantheon. I have seen Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mahavira all floating in e-space waiting to shower the most consecrated of the email forwarding devotees with boundless luck. I guess if I had forwarded all such mails since my college days, when I opened my first e-mail account, I should have been a millionaire by now, enjoying holidays in the Caribbean or Switzerland, with the loads of accumulated luck doing all the work for me.

Friends of mine (who are geniuses in their fields) on receiving such mails, stop work and diligently forward such emails to their friends. I am amused at times. At other times frustration creeps up and I shout, "You are a well educated Indian, you know how e-mail works. Then how the hell could you believe that forwarding 15 mails that are totally useless can bring you good luck. It all stumps me. Visiting the temple 15 times would be more advisable. Maybe its calm environs would have had a healing effect on your frayed nerves and mental acumen". "Well Vijay, I know all that, but then why take risk... after all I just need to press the forward button", I get the reply. For a person whose myopic vision misses the bigger picture, I have nothing more to say. May his e-mail Gods bless him with better sense.

With as many Gods as there are Indians, I fear the day when every Indian is e-enabled. Our Gods will be jostling with each other to acquire some e-space. I am seriously considering writing to Google, Yahoo and Hotmail to introduce a new button "God Spam" to dump such mails. Trust the Indians to use technology to their maximum benefit and also abuse it to the maximum extent.