Grains of sand in an hour clock

I believe it won’t be a task to guess this is going to be like a trip down the memory lane. But this one is a little different- it’s a walk down the memories attached to my mail box. I know- it is absurd; but I did discover something- a mail box wide open does not lie. Also, a look down the mail box was not one of my stray week end thought; it was sparked by what happened this morning.

Out of the blue today, I happened to chat with my friend Rahul Pilani today and it struck me- damn, there was a time we had at least two forwards being shared across, chat on the messenger all night and all this was after having spent the whole day in college in the same class. Today, we started from the page where we knew the name and face; but no clue what we both are doing. End result- it prompted me to run down my mail box to trace when was it last I wrote a group mail to my college buddies.

What is has done has opened up a whole journey of time travel. My mail box has actually marked events in my life along with how I have changed as a person along the way.

I discovered I have a mail id on Yahoo since 1998, something I have as my rightful ownership since junior college when thanks to my brother, we finally had an internet enabled PC in the house. Those were the day of stealing user ids and passwords off VSNL users, 28.3 kbps modems and the ‘ppp’ and ‘F6’ to get into the wonder world of internet. I had a student account on VSNL that allowed no graphics, no surprise I never liked it or used it to the full.

By 1999, I was into engineering and the new toys in hand were the ICQ messenger, Yahoo Chat rooms etc. (Sorry, I’m unable to recall some other chat sites I frequented) Its stunning to know that I was a quite a flirt. I have mails from some girls in Brazil, Australia, Latvia, Estonia… with the most idiotic hi-hello conversations- characteristic of adolescence. To my surprise, I discovered having a seemingly regular chat relation with a medical college student from Pune, a commerce student from Cuttack and an Arts student from Mumbai. I can still remember the first one is married and settled in UK; the female from Cuttack called me when she was in Mumbai, but that’s about it.

The earliest forwards was from a friend from college send me a mail titled “Type of men you meet in the Loo”, I took her case real bad coz the content was really intricate. Have a mail from my brother about what all can happen with ‘Hotel Soap’. Jokes, chain mails, pictures of Ferrari’s and cars as attachments- the list is just too long.

Somewhere around 2002, there is the first hint of me and my mail box becoming a bit serious, the first mail with assignment files on mail. The attachment is 28 kb- a word document on infra red imaging has set the stage for a lot of links of machines and technologies. By August 2003 the first CV has left the box, but not many replies to in seen. A mail in December that same year is from Team Lease; asking me for my bank details for my first pay, followed by a string of financial queries, pay slips and arbit stuff from Wipro GE Medical Systems.

In 2004, I started writing group mails to my friends, my first baby steps towards writing. The replies have been mostly critical of my typos and language errors. Never the less every single one was encouraging. There is also a new approach to flirting with me doing some research for the final project of a girl I liked, 7 mails on a subject I had no clue of... Well I somehow was confident that the way to success was to be the man around when it mattered- quite a myth as I see it now.

The next big thing was 2005, where lies my first Resignation letter. This one comes from a web site named i-resign.com which composed it for me off a template for the given situation. I copied this one and sent it to my boss. My Parting mail was replied back by almost all who received it. Some were encouraging my next move, some wishing the best, some summing up the 18 month journey as the start of a new one.

2005 to 2006, my mails have been a string of applications for MBA colleges, information on colleges and update from forums.

What is beyond 2006 is what I said the Gmail effect. Orkut became a hit and I shifted out to Gmail as my primary mail id. Yahoo still remained but became more of a receiving box rather than a send box. With that came a different set of friends and the old, either moved to Gmail or started losing touch.

In a way that is how advances in internet changed my life. What was once precious, became more like a storage. Like grains of sand in the hour clock, it moves from one side to the other, it settles at the bottom and sometimes gets lost as more grains come on top.