Bloody forwards

I hate forwards. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. I hate them with all the hate there is in my heart. In the past two years, not a day has gone by without some junk arriving in my mailbox. Everyday, I get dozens of mails, with all kinds of subjects. Continuing chain letters, forwarded senti messages that will make my wishes come true, corny jokes that seem completely out of place unless they are seen on Bhavya's blog (under the sasta of the day heading), I've seen it all.

But now a new problem has risen. A problem that totally eclipses the nuisance of email forwards. A problem, that for now, leaves me horrified at the extent of its malice and spite. Now we have cellphone forwards. And they're just as irritating, if not more.

Here's a forwarded message that I got yesterday.

"To celebrate the 2nd anniversary of Airtel GPRS service, Airtel is giving Rs. 300 talktime to all those who are forwarding this message. Forward this message to 10 Airtel subscribers, and win Rs. 300 talktime. Express yourself.

Hurry, it's working."

You can well imagine what my feelings were when I got that forward. Being the gullible freak that I am, and not having received a lot of SMS forwards, and therefore not knowing about the harm that they usually cause, I forwarded the SMS to lots of people. The message said 10, but just to make sure my reward was not denied to me, I sent it to 20, secretly hoping and praying that they gave me 600 bucks instead of the 300 they had promised (I did double the work, after all). Then I sat with my phone in hand, and waited. And waited. And then I waited some more. After about an hour of waiting, it slowly began to dawn on me. I had been had (How's that for legitimate grammar, Mr. Misra), I'd been swindled, cheated, duped. Some bored, stupid sonofabitch had started this, and I, like a vulnerable fool had fallen into his trap.

But my troubles, you see, were far from over. They had in fact, just about started. After a while, I received a rather threatening message from Ms. Ashna Sridhar, one of my friends who had been one of the lucky recipients of the forward I had sent. The exact phraseology of the message can not be reproduced here, in keeping with this blog's anti-expletive outlook, but the gist of it, was pretty much as follows.

"Manu, if this thing doesn't work, you're going to get screwed."

As other people I had sent the message to began realizing the truth, similar messages started pouring in, and in a period of about 30 minutes, I had with me a nice collection of 17 of them. If I remember correctly, there were 6 people who wanted to do things to me that can not and should not be mentioned here, for reasons given above, 3 people who wanted to poison me, 2 who wanted to club me to death, 2 who wanted to shoot me, 1 who wanted to bite off my leg and beat me to death with it and 1 who very unceremoniously told me, in the now renowned words of the Vice President of the USA, Mr. Richard Cheney, to go f*** myself. In addition to that, there were 2 people who wanted nothing more than to disable me for life (very civil of them, I must say).

In addition to those rather horrific messages, I was also started receiving, at periodic intervals of time, the original message that had caused all the madness. It seemed like all the Airtel subscribers in Delhi had caught on in a big way. And every time the forward arrived, it reminded me of my idiocy. How could I have possibly been stupid enough not to have seen through it. The signs were all there. The promising of a huge amount of money, the use of an occasion to justify it, the corny use of the slogan, and the addition of "Hurry. It's working." as an after-thought. I felt so stupid. In retrospect, I think, the only thing the message didn't do was explicitly state, "If you forward this, you're the biggest sucker there ever was." And yet I thought it was genuine. I can see that I have a lot to learn

The end result of this entire fiasco is that I'm 20 bucks poorer, and I'm probably going to be tortured and killed within the next 2-3 hours. So if this blog is not updated in the coming few days, or weeks, do not feel it to be an odd occurrence.

To use somebody else's catch-phrase, So long, and thanks for all the fish.