Congratulations! You've Won!!

Clearly I had discovered something spectacular. I spent the whole morning hunched over my computer screen, my mouth wide open, half of my pound cake slice already swimming in the morning coffee. But I was oblivious to all trivial things such as a soggy cake slice or buttery coffee for that matter. "Did you know I had a uncle in Nigeria who has made a ton of money in mining bauxite or something", I told my wife, Koli. "Now that he has died - god bless his soul - the kind bloke has bequeathed me $20,500,000.00USD in his living Will! Now how often does a kind Nigerian man think about his poor graduate student nephew, scraping together a living here in the US?". "As far as I know no one even remotely related to your family lived in Nigeria and more importantly, no one in your family has even come close to earning that much money let alone give it away to some remote relation", Koli said. I couldn't help but agree that Koli had a point. She always does. And that never fails to surprise me.

Now of course I knew that the email was a hoax and I have received dozens of such missives from dead uncles, aunts, cousins, from places as distant as Borneo or Cape Town, and from all of whom I had inherited millions of dollars. All that I would have to do was give their attorney my bank account details, my address and my social security number and the transaction in my bank account would be complete and money would pour in. Of course I never doubted the direction the pouring bank notes would follow - that is out of my account, and into my dead uncle or aunt or nephew's, but I have always been fascinated by the unfailing motivation of the people who compose such emails and their firm belief in the fact that one day some unlucky (or rather stupid) soul would fall for it.

The fact that my Sunday morning has been occupied to this extent by dead uncles and aunts is due to a mischance by which I happened to peek into my 'Spam' folder. This is the folder where everything from advertisments for flower delivery services to that email your boss sent you 3 days ago asking you to complete an assignment due today, resides. I had found a virtual cornucopia of interesting emails that I never knew existed and I grew increasingly goggle-eyed as I sifted through them.

I was happy to see all the attorneys from my various dead relatives writing to me promising me millions of dollars. My only complaints were that the attorneys could have learnt to write better English and my aunt who 'pased away to glory (Natural Cardiac Arrest) at age 71' could have been named something other than 'Madame Olivia'. Overall, I calculated that I have earned seventeen million, two hundred and thirty thousand dollars this week, and that gave me immense satisfaction.

Besides the boost from thinking about millions of dollars, there were some emails that promised a different kind of boost. This one not much to do with mental satisfaction though...'Bigger is Better!', 'Make it Big!', 'Grow and Surprise Her'... Very inspirational on first thought, but I am pretty sure this is not what Koli means when she tells me to 'grow up...and don't be a baby', at times when I am complaining that I would look like a fool in front of everyone when presenting at some impending conference. I peered over my screen to look at her. She gave me a look of suspicion she normally gives me when she finds a beer bottle from the fridge missing. Nope...I am pretty sure her definition of growing up was different...and I am sure that she would be pretty surprised if I started doing what the email I am reading urges me to do.

There were emails claiming to cure baldness, emails claiming that one would lose 30 pounds in two weeks. This one I read again to see if meant 'pounds' in body weight or 'pounds' as in the currency of Great Britain. Turned out it was both, except that the GBP you would lose was off by a factor of ten - 300 rather than 30. 'A minor typo', I decided. Then there were emails from pretty young things that wanted to 'meet up' or 'have some fun' or 'hang out' or were 'looking for a good time'. I didn't know if I had a 'good time' that they was looking for. My belief is that I don't actually own one of those, for I have incessantly repeated 'This is not a good time' to people who have called me up trying to tell me that I have won a $50,000 cruise holiday...and then I had disconnected. So I clearly did not have the 'good time' the PYT's in the email were looking for. I know...Its embarrassing like when a person on the street asks me, "Do you have a light?", and I say, "Sorry I don't smoke"... Plus I think even if I did happen to possess a 'good time', Koli would not approve of me handing them out to some random PYT who was looking for it.

In an eureka moment, as the rest of my pound cake joined its soggy half in my coffee cup, I realized that discovering my spam folder has been quite an eye-opener for me. Everyday we face a deluge of emails in our Inboxes. Amongst these mails we have a regular boring heap of 'junk' mail, which are basically emails that large legit companies send out, en masse. From the moment you buy something from their websites till eternity, these emails will continue to fill your Inbox like trinkets in a hoarder's apartment. There is no escape from these unless you actually take the pain to unsubscribe from these and often that is more easily said than done. These emails are apparently 'personalized' for you and you only,the big corporations pretending as if you you are their most important customer, even though you may have just bought a box of toothpicks from them. These 'junk' emails want you to spend your money and improve your life in many different ways, legitimately of course. As I looked back into my Inbox all I could see were virtual signatures of unscrupulous, mercenary big corporations, after your money...I was taken aback! I had never looked at email this way. It was as if the emails had a life of their own...and the most boisterous, overbearing, mercenary ones resided in my Inbox. The place where all the important stuff should be...the digital space that defines and rules my day to day life.

I switched back to the 'Spam' folder... And increasingly I could see the difference in personalities of the emails in the Spam folder. I gradually realized that spam is where all the interesting stuff resides, but the 'intelligent' email programs never would have us see these emails. All of that gets filtered out by the mail filters. Most of us in our daily routine of sifting through the junk mail and reading the actual emails from friends, family and associates, forget that behind the massive overload of information in our Inboxes, there lies a completely different and simpler world of the 'Spam' folder where simple beliefs and trusts still survive. Here a scammer from Connecticut can pose as a Malian prince and ask you very courteously for your bank account number and social security number so that he can transfer 2 million dollars to your account. Talk about personal interaction, talk about freedom of expression and talk about unabashedly saying 'Give me your money!'. I would prefer to receive such emails any day than from a big corporation selling you a 7-inch screen which has more pixels in HD than a comparable 10-inch screen. Talking of personal interaction...look further down your spam folder. 'Jennifer' is really concerned that your love life is not what it used to be. She tells you to take some pills that will really help to grow and 'stand up' to the problem. Thats Concern with a capital C....or was it Cialis...well doesn't really matter. Mindy and Cynthia are so concerned that you are lonely and depressed that they would actually like to meet up with you and raise your spirits. Wouldn't you rather be intrigued and fascinated by the above email in thinking who in the right mind would respond to Mindy and Cynthia...rather than clicking like a zombie through a mass email from Walmart telling you that you can save $2 on a bottle of gummy vitamins.

So I tell you...In this busy busy world of business and work and tension...pause, take a deep breath and check out your spam folder...You are guranteed to feel better after finding out that you have inherited a million dollars or there is still hope for your disappearing hair. It is guaranteed to make you smile and fill you with wonder...as long as you don't click on a link and download a virus. Then that may make you wonder why you listened to me in the first place...and also please don't tell my wife that this was what I was doing when I was sitting across her with my Sunday morning coffee.

 

This is the Image from the paper

This is a paper we published for our Annual Fest at the School of Life Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University back in April 2005. Co-authors were Manish Kushwaha and Sayantan Bose

The Baba of Small Things

As I was contemplating adding another teaspoon of sugar to my morning coffee, my wife, Koli, asked me, “Did you see that Baba Ramdev is on a protest fast? One of the things he is advocating for is death penalty to anyone who kills a cow…”

I looked tenderly at the corned beef on the table. “Well if not anything it will stop you from eating all that beef and getting fat”, my wife concluded. Koli, as always in her inimitable way somehow managed to channel Indian politics onto my ever- increasing (in her opinion) waistline. This is a mere example of her ability to take anything from rising gas prices to unrest in the Middle East and blame my good old Bengali paunch as the causative agent. But at that moment it seemed like the Bharat Swabhiman Andolan would launch itself full tilt into my quiet and peaceful Sunday morning, rather like the way those ads unsuspectingly blowup in your face whenever you log onto the Times of India website. The other day I forgot that I actually wanted to check out what Mahesh Bhatt had to say about the Pakistani actress Meera, and almost got badgered into buying a 4-pound pack of some generic fiber supplement to improve my bowel movement. But I wander…

I think it is the thought of giving up beef forever or else finding myself in front of a firing range, which was driving me nuts. I started wondering how a Godman would kill somebody in a death penalty situation? Would they use the electric chair or would they rain down curses on that person until they shrivel up and die? Avada Kedavra? Or maybe something from the Hinduvta Godmen Book of Curses. Or you know what? In fact, they could take a leaf out of the Taliban’s book of capital punishment. I know we call them terrorists, but hey, capital punishment is capital punishment! As Baba Ramdev says, capital punishment would allow sinners like gays and cow slaughterers to gain moksha.

My wife shook me from my reverie for a moment, “Floated into one of your day dreams as usual, haven’t you? Drink your coffee before it gets cold”. I smiled and said, “Honey, did you know Baba Ramdev is against all foreign brands? If his party wins, you’d better bid goodbye to your favorite chocolates and stuff, coz’ you know…foreign brands are out.”

“And you don’t forget to practice drinking unsweetened milk coz’ that is what we’ll get from vending machines instead of your favorite cola brand…”, Koli hit back. Wonder how she does that…somehow she always manages trump me in whatever I say! “And thank your stars that hopefully it will be milk and not the other bovine fluid option…carbonated for extra zing…but don’t worry, even if that is the case, I am sure it would have been blessed by a certified Hindu guru before packaging”, she added.

I was finding this fascinating. Baba Ramdev and his vision were starting to open up new vistas for our great Hindustan. What a country we would be! We would be a bunch of proud Hindus leading the nation. And with a skewed sex ratio of 940 females per 1000 males, we can declare the remaining 60 men who do not find a wife, as gays. And since Baba Ramdev says that gays are actually sick people and unnatural, we can bundle them with the lower castes, which means more people doing menial jobs, which equals to clean streets and cities.

And other religions? Of course we won’t convert them (at least for now), but even they know that Lord Ram Is The True Saviour And Trinity Rules Supreme. But Whatever They May Claim, Spirituality and Cosmic Consciousness Are Reserved For Hindus Only…. At this point Koli interrupted my chain of thought again, “Why do you have to think aloud? And why do you have to capitalize everything you say, like it Really Means Something?” “Well”, I mumbled. “This is how I used to score points in my ‘Ideals and Progresses’ spirituality class at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram School I went to. We used to learn big polysyllabic words like – ‘Supreme, Consciousness, Being, etc and use those to write pages after pages of what I can only describe as excretement of the highest quality. And these words were always capitalized for no apparent reason…”, I reasoned.

“Well don’t you think it’s wrong?”, my wife asked.

“What! Me scoring marks in the I/P class?! Dear, I had to pass that test by whatever means possible!” I was ready to defend my tactics designed to ace the spirituality test, come what may.

“No, no I meant Indian politics turning out the way you were describing”, she seemed irritated by my stupidity.

“Well the people of India must decide. You know if they find the oodles of Hinduvta oozing out of them on Election Day, they will vote for Baba Ramdev”, I said. “But if you ask me, I would have voted for someone else. Someone who is much calmer and more stable and seemed to be more sage-like in all he does”

“And who is that, may I ask?” I could tell Koli had grown really skeptical at this point.

“Swami Nityanand. I would vote for him any day over Guru Ramdev. He is a true guru if ever there was one - a simple man, who made ‘Seva’ his ‘dharma’. Receiving ‘seva’, not providing it though….but who’s complaining? Only jealous people are. People who’d love to receive such ‘seva’ of the finest quality, but know that they never can. Coz’ everyone is not Swami Nityananda.”

The look on Koli’s face was a mixture of pity, amusement and indignation. I could tell she was probably having second thoughts about me.

I took advantage of her bemusement and went on - “As one friend quoted Swami Nityananda, the other day – ‘If you speak to Lady, do not touch the Body. If you touch the Body, someone will make a CD’. Very true words, in this day and age. As a matter of fact, I think what he really meant was – let the Lady touch you first… That’s chivalry! Such a gentleman! So my choice would be Swami Nityananda as the President of India!”

I made a last ditch effort in trying to campaign for my presidential candidate of choice, “No one else will pay that much attention to the Women’s bill and vote for womens' lib. Although I have a sneaking feeling he means 'liberation' in more ways than one. But anyhow it should make you happy….and herein rests my case.”

I realized that by then my coffee had grown cold.

A whole lot of hot air

In India, on second class trains ('Sleeper' being the more PC form), you don't get the luxury of sheets and linen. As a kid, while traveling with my parents we always carried air pillows. Now out of these one was leaky...I don't know why we continued to preserve it...but it always ended up in our bags. Maybe it was difficult to distinguish from the others when flat and my Mom was too lazy to find out which one or maybe she played this game of Russian Roulette with us on the train (I always thought she had this slight smile on her face when she handed them out to us). Anyways, so there was always a distinct possibility that you would wake up lying with your head flat on the bunk bed...and you realize that you had been relying on nothing but hot air to provide you with a good night's sleep...and just like a whole lot of hot air...in the end it came to naught.
...And that my dear readers is all this blog is about...a whole lot of hot air...speculations, discussions...but not really leading to comprehensive conclusions...
So when you have nothing better to do and have counted all the fruit flies hovering over that uneaten fruit on your table, please drop by for a read...I'll usually have something up, even though it maybe quite irregular at times.