Tags
challenge, children, emails, First Born, memories, postaday, RamblingsInFebruary, second born, sons
The fun we have when we go through old stuff! Today for some reason I was going through old emails. Well, the reason was that while blogging at the now extinct Yahoo 360, a fellow blogger had made a display picture for me, a woman in a salwar kameez, wearing a helmet and holding a gun, and standing before a red brick wall.
Each and every item in the picture had some significance and was supposed to show me in my warrior mode ready to take on anyone who crossed my path the wrong way. It was all done in jest and we had a lot of fun throwing imaginary bricks at whoever needed a conk on the head.
Today I spent time going through old photographs in my Google album hoping to find the display picture. No luck. Then I went through old emails. Perhaps the creator had emailed it to me all those years back and I still had it somewhere in the twenty-thousand nine hundred and seventy nine or so mails I have.
No amount of searching for hours trying different combinations of using keywords brought up any such picture. But it brought to the surface other interesting stuff, pictures I had sent/received, and mails I had almost forgotten I had ever written/received.
One such gem I came across was written by me, a group email to my brother and sister in law, sister and brother in law, informing them about the First Born’s interview with a start up. What made me smile was what the Second Born (still in school at the time) had to say and which I quoted in my letter: “Of course he would definitely clear the interview and get the job since THEY contacted HIM, not the other way around!”
I had also added this: This is the same guy who believed that his older brother could easily make it to the Indian cricket team in school since he was as good as Sachin Tendulkar. What faith he has in his brother, I had concluded.
You know what’s so awesome about all this? That I found it today and could read and enjoy something about which I have absolutely no memory! Nothing. Nyet. Nada. And yet there it was in black and white for me to read.
So what was it that people go on about? That ONLY handwritten letters bring back wonderful memories or something of the sort. Oh yeah, emails aren’t supposed to do the same because when you re-read emails your brain freezes up and goes all blank, with memories running helter-skelter, ending up shutting themselves in dark recesses of your brain. Right? Oh give me a break!
The screenshot of the email has been shared to our family group for the boys, their girls and the dad to read and enjoy. I probably have more stuff lying around to be discovered. What fun!
Shail Mohan 2023
Shail's Nest 
Great fun indeed. Serendipitously, I unearthed an e-mail from the depths of my piles of papers sent to me by one of my sons in 2015. A friend of theirs his had written a ditty about cricket along the lines of ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ When I gave it to him this morning he was delighted 🙂
I never store emails (or anything I’ve written to anyone). But my brain is a pretty large dump – yesterday for example, I remembered a small incident that happened in high school and wrote about it to a friend who was in it. She was able to recollect it after I told her. But in a way you are right. When you put it in words and revisit it, it is more real. Memory can sometimes be embellished (subconsciously).
I think emails are every bit as good as hand-written letters – better! since I HATE writing letters but love a good email.
I have a very good friend who was a blogger about Bangladesh back in the days when I did the same. She was one of the first bloggers I followed as we were both Europeans getting to grips with living in Asia. She then moved to London and we became good friends in real life.
But she closed down her blog and lost all contact with the website. Many years later I told her I get email notifications for ALL the blogs I follow and she asked me to forward them on to her. I did so and it brought her great joy. She had forgotten all the things she had written about bringing up a baby daughter in Bangladesh and the emails allowed those memories and feelings to come flooding back.