Yahoo! It's a Spice-y Connect-ion - Part I

It was about a year or so ago that a friend of mine suggested to me that I should write about the way I got married. Since I can’t really do justice to the beauty and wonder of it all, I refrained until now. So, what has changed now, you might ask. My writing skills have definitely not improved dramatically. But I thought I’ll write it up nevertheless as a gift for my wonderful wife for the sixth wedding anniversary of ours.

It was in 1998 that I first read about chatting. That was the year when I first obtained an email ID, one which was very short-lived. It was hari_prabha@hotmail.com, but no one I knew had an email ID, and I wasn’t expecting to receive any mail, so I didn’t bother to check until about 3-4 months later by which time the email account had been closed for lack of usage. It was then that I opened my next email ID, again in Hotmail, hari_prabhakaran@hotmail.com (both these email IDs are defunct now). This time, even though I still didn’t receive any mails, I kept checking it every 1-2 weeks. That ensured that while there weren’t anyone in the world to send me a mail, I was prepared if some such person were to suddenly pop up. By 1999, though, few of my cousins and friends also had opened up IDs, and I was becoming a more enthusiastic user of emails.

Even though I had increased my usage of email, I still hadn’t started chatting over the net. I used to wonder what pleasure people derived by typing out messages to people around the world whom one couldn’t see. As is the case with most things with me, first-hand experience changed my opinion. With me, it wasn’t until early 2001, when I got a job in Bangalore, that I started chatting. The job required me to open up an ID in Yahoo! as its chat feature was used for intra-office communication. This led me to slowly explore the open chat feature as well, and before long, I was hooked on to it. Suddenly, I was spending my free time at cyber cafes, chatting up with people all over the globe. In all this, I hope I helped alleviate a few of the misconceptions about India as well. One was when a friend from Alaska asked whether she could have a baby elephant for a gift since she thought elephants roamed freely around Indian cities and roads, and I said that wasn’t the case. Another was convincing a lady that I couldn’t possibly use a blow pipe of the kind used by snake charmers and attempt to tame a rattlesnake. A guy from Belgium was surprised to know that I didn’t practice the 60-odd poses described in Kama Sutra or that I don’t take hashish for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. In fact, his opinion about Indians actually went down a notch or two, I guess, when he came to know that I don’t smoke at all and haven’t done drugs and there are others too like me in India!

My roommates at that time were pretty adept at striking up a conversation with all and sundry in person, but they somehow found it quite difficult to find a similar success in the virtual world. What was even more irritating to them was the fact that a reticent guy like me could effortlessly do it. This resulted in a few attempts by them to create fake IDs and chat with me but I generally found them out after a few minutes. This didn’t take any great deducing from my side, because while they changed the IDs, they never managed to change their thought processes, and it wasn’t difficult to see through that, considering the fact that we were all staying together at that time. So, when a mail landed in my Yahoo! inbox sometime late in May 2002 from a girl in Kolkata who was claiming that I had chat with her a week back, I felt it was a more sophisticated approach from my friends. What made me suspicious even more was the fact that it was Malayali girl who had written that mail to me, and I didn’t even vaguely remember chatting to a Malayali girl. Although my initial reaction was to let it go, I decided I’d play along and expose them sooner or later. So, I kept my reply very much to the point. I wasn’t very surprised to see another mail the next day, but I was impressed with my friends after reading the contents because that mail looked so unlike them. I carried on with the charade for about a week when I decided that this couldn’t go on like this and decided to test her out. I wrote to her that I would like to talk to her, though I kept the real intention of the whole thing to myself. As I was hoping, she said that she would ring up my mobile since she didn’t have one.

While my friends might have created a fake ID, I knew them to be too stingy to arrange someone in Kolkata to carry on with the game. So, when she called me up and I saw Kolkata area code, I was convinced that this person was much more genuine than I thought. Since we had been writing to each other in English, we started talking to each other in English, and I remember thinking to myself that she did have an easy laugh which I liked. With the confirmation that she is indeed someone real and not a figment of my friends’ imagination, I first apologized to my friends and then opened up a bit more in my mails to her. There is something in the virtual world which would put a person at ease, making it easier for him (or even her, I guess) to open up. I, for one, am more candid while talking through the keyboard than through the mouth.

Very soon, a routine was set wherein I’d check my Yahoo! inbox before I’d start work. I’d start writing a mail even as I’d be working and list out all that’s happened on the previous day, something that happened in my life earlier, and a few tidbits about my family as well. Her mails also would follow a similar pattern, though she couldn’t match me when it came to long-windedness. She would occasionally call me (she didn’t want me to call up her home and she didn’t have a mobile at that time), mostly during weekends, and we’d chat for some time on whatever we wrote over the mail. In 2002, the national call rates were on the costlier side, and telecom companies charged the customers even for incoming calls. So, while Yahoo! facilitated our meeting, it was Spice who started enjoying the fruits of it first. Finding it increasingly difficult to call me from outside her home, she decided to purchase a mobile for herself, thus making Connect too join Spice in making some extra profits thanks to us.

It could have been the fact that we weren’t trying to impress each other which helped us to be so open and free with each other. I didn’t find any difficulty discussing my disappointments and failures with her as much as I enjoyed talking about my successes. That also probably solidified the foundations for a stronger structure that was slowly but surely coming up. (To be continued…..)