iFaithful

i am the wet dream of every internet corporation, or atleast i would've been if they know me better.

it's called brand consciousness and faithfulness when you decide to stick to one in particular, no matter how fucked up it turns out to be over the course of... say, a decade, which it has been in this case.

when i was a little boy, having an email id was a way of living... actually, no but having one meant you knew enough about computers to be able to browse porn on your own without having to look through your brother's stash, and since i don't have one, computer knowledge was handy.

hotmail was in the papers because some indian dude made it and microsoft gave him half a billion for it... sucker, i should say, he could've made a billion off it easy. it sounded good, i liked the crispy blue inbox so i went for it... kalhan_raina@hotmail.com is what it said on the make-believe visiting card i had in my head but then i forgot the password... so i had to add a suffix to my name and given surname.

you know what else was "in" at that time? rambo... oh yeah, stallone, the dick with the bicep. as desperate as i was to not be "in" at the time (i wouldn't be allowed "in" anyway... why try?) i chose james bond... the dick with the aston martin. so kalhan_raina007@hotmail.com it was... without a moment to spare, i jotted down the password everywhere i could.. notebooks, school cafeteria wall, blah blah. not a very bright idea because now, everyone knew... but that didn't bother me, no sir... "go right ahead", i said, "feel free to read the enlarge-your-penis and insure-your-shoes ads that i get spammed with every week".

over the course of the nine years i've owned the make-believe internet space i was granted by hotmail, i've stuck with it through thick and thin. mostly thin. back in mah day i only had a 2mb storage space, not enough to store even those annoying image forwards that were so fucking popular then, all i had in my inbox was a 92kbps version of "sheena is a punk rocker" by the ramones and a few emails, strictly text. it was alright, 2mb is almost as much as a floppy disc, which is... was... a whole lot.

hotmail was generous though, they granted me 10mb after 3 years of my stern read-and-delete-email policy... in went another ramones song that i could store for all eternity.

then came another hurdle... gmail. a gigabyte of email space... i could've put in the entire ramones discography in there, but no... the gmail white didn't look too good as compared to the hotmail crispy blues... so i kept it...

hotmail probably sensed that i was sticking to it through all the muh-ch better options from other domains and let me have a gb too... but out went the spams... weekly too. i was sick of asking people to buy iphones and take vacations, even though it wasn't me, just my id. and it rhymes, so it must be true, that's all i can say in my defence for now... and you know what? i let it. i just assumed that people in my address list were smart enough to understand what was spam and what wasn't... and that i wouldn't really ask people to buy iphones or take vacations to places i'd never go to but man was i wrong... soon i got tired of repeatedly typing out the same explaination to every dumb-ass query. "spams are being sent, i don't know how, leave me alone".

off went my address list, and the 300 odd people i had on my msn list just to make their e-lives easier and now i'm back, oh yeah, after a long fucking vacation, ready to reply to every "where the fuck are you" email and it won't let me log in... nope, password changed or some shit... i feel like a part of me has died, the part of me that lived online for nearly ten years on hotmail... and i don't want to switch, or get a kalhan_raina008@hotmail.com.

i am the corporate wet dream that hotmail screwed over so bad... especially since now i write for about 25 blogs, all linked to this particular id, the only im service i have active is rediff which isn't so bad but for now, i think i've reached the end of the internet. there's nothing left to do here i haven't done before... "go out and play", says the voice inside my head.