Worthless Wishes

The entire practice of sending sms-greetings during festive occasions seems to be in a sorry state of (lazy) charmlessness.

This Diwali, I received the following message from three different people (quoting here as is):

Now ... I consider myself lucky to have people who want to send smses to me on festive occasions, wishing me all the goodness in life. Very lucky. However, it turns me off when people resort to the stale practice of forwarding messages. 

Not a great analogy probably, but it feels like they are re-sending a used Archies greeting card. Or, as Nehru used to say about eating with knives and forks, it's like making love through an interpreter (read this in the Walter Crocker's very fabulous Nehru: A Contemporary's Estimate)!

SMS greetings look really graceful if they are personal, and unique. On a typical festival day, an average mobile number receives atleast 15 greetings. I receive around 20 or so ... and while the untimely, persistent beeping of the phone is quite a pain, it becomes an ever bigger one to receive the same message from 6 different people (not just similar - but same ... same)! Imagine receiving this message 4 times in 2 hours:

My first reaction, when I receive such messages, is to sigh in my mind and reflect on the creative handicap of the sender. Instinctively, the sender falls down a few notches on my i-admire-you meter.

As an initial consolation, it feels good to realise that the sender actually remembered you - until the realisation dawns upon that it may have been a message he or she beamed to the entire phonebook. Then, it starts feeling utterly inadequate as a 'greeting'.

Around the turn of the year, I was so imbibed in the fear of receiving stale happy-new-year smses that I was tempted to shut the phone down! I didn't, and to my surprise, the frequency of stale messages was very, very less (probably also because I chose to call a lot of my phone book roster people to wish them a good 2009 - so, most of them didn't find much reason to send in an sms).

The best part was: Ashish (who, now, prefers to spell it as Aasheesh) sent me a message that just stood out. We have been talking about Ghalib a lot off late, and it was a pleasant move on his part to send in this sms as a new year message: