Shorter.. Faster... Closer....

That’s how we want everything these days.

I always thought that only skirts got shorter but everything seems to – blogs, textbooks, work hours, meetings. Everything is becoming more and more concise. We cannot imagine reading more than 200 pages of a novel. Soap operas are of course an incongruous reality. They seem to be in some sort of a stretching competition.

Instant coffee and noodles are such a rage these days. There seems to be an eternal dearth of staying power to get the results of anything. Finding treasures and killing the enemy in computer games is also much quicker these days. However we still wait in long queues for petrol, movie tickets and restaurants.

We want everything - super markets, theatres and ATMs close to us all the time. We need all these essential services that are so vital to our existence in this material world, at an arm’s length away. A radius of one mile is probably the farthest it can get. The few reasons we would probably take some extra trouble to travel that extra mile would be for life threatening reasons. These reasons could be as grave as the impending dangers of not attending birthday bashes, farewell parties or sulking boyfriends / girlfriends.

This shorter / faster / closer fad has become such an incantation in every aspect of our life. This malady seems to be a universal phenomenon. It is affecting people of all age groups, races, professions, hair colours and skin types.

Why are we becoming such an edgy race? Why do we want instant gratification all the time? Why are we losing the patience to read and write more? Why do have such stunted attention spans? Is this a necessary corollary to urbanization?

I had to think for long hours and only then I could get close to the conclusion. This has nothing to do with global warming or nuclear proliferation. It has something to do with the scenes we are exposed to all the time. The amount of profanity we notice in the world around us simply evaporates all the patience we can store inside us. Everyone wants to re iterate that ‘Been there done that’ attitude. We are constantly playing a dangerous game of out proving our peers all the time. All this simply shows how increasingly insecure we are becoming.

A direct consequence of all this is the modern day palliatives such as material comforts. However, along with shorter Bibles, shorter ways to achieve Nirvana we should also have shorter lines of cars and shorter women at beauty contests. Along with faster ways of getting high, such as tequila shots we should also have faster ways of getting to work such as magic carpets or brooms and instant slimming solutions. Along with closer shopping malls we should have closer relationships with people.

Looking Back on Forwards

Small forwards, Big forwards
Good forwards, bad forwards

Seeing forwards in our inboxes is as common a ritual as driving out cockroaches from your kitchen and finding them giving a knowing smirk the next day. Call it the side effects of a click happy generation who has just tasted the success of internet accessibility or a genuinely concerned knowledge spreading population; it does influence our life in more ways than one.



Importance –

I can imagine life without internet, but life without forwards seems as colourless as the Sahara desert. Forwards have become so indispensable that all of us check our e mail accounts before business mail queues.. The only reason one would contradict this grave truth is when an appraisal is around the corner and one has to show that ones interest lies in the business of business and not the business of forwards

Since we value knowledge so much, it does all of us a world of good to read about Sardar jokes, Crush calculators and see pictures of stars in their younger days and of course cute babies.

Feigning an entire day’s of hard work is not an easy task. It can be daunting to pretend to be busy as a bee on ’No work days’ without the unending stream of forwards. In short forwards are like an important shot in the arm to pull you through the drudgery of having no work at all to do

It helps us increase our knowledge exponentially. We get informed on Current Affairs (and past ones too of nearly all celebrities), politics (the most happening parties in town), sports (who is sporting what hairstyle) etc. All this wisdom keeps us so up to date with our peers and provides very good discussion topics.

Range –

The range that is provided by forwards is the next best thing to the varieties of Kellogg cornflakes. Love, Cars, PJs, Quotes, the list is endless. The most common ones however happen to be some threatening one that if you don’t pass it on you will beget bad luck forever. Seems like I will end up with all the bad luck in the world because even the threat does not intimidate me enough to send it.

You can categorize them into many types.
- Luck bringing and non luck bringing
- Love related and non love related
- Jokes and non jokes
- Power point presentations and word documents
- Animated and Non Animated.

Reasons -

I have always wondered why we are such a compulsive forward forwarding population.

Is it because we are so forward thinking?
Or do we want to stay forward in the information age?
Or do we look forward to interesting reads?

Then I look back at my inbox and realize that it is just that it is such a habit. When one gets a good forward there is no looking backwards it is simply going forward to the address book and doing a ‘send all’. And the quantum of receiving forwards is magnifying as we move forward in the 21st century.

The future –

In the future we are each going to receive so many forwards that one day our inboxes are going to explode. Then some really and rarely useful ones such as Virus warnings, Petitions, Cool facts will simply get lost in the imbroglio. This will be a serious fall out of that.

Maybe we should go one step forward and organize some sort of convention to regulate this. When we can have the Kyoto Protocol, The Doha rounds, why not a really well thought of and forward thinking ‘Forward Summit’?