Do you still have an e-mail account that you used back in school?
My first email account was on Hotmail (now known as Microsoft Outlook – guess they figured out just how shady Hotmail sounded) and I had created it when I was probably thirteen. So freaking long ago. There were a couple of weird Yahoo email accounts in between, all long-forgotten. But guess what – I still have access to my first Hotmail account.
I used the same Hotmail account till I was in college, after which I pretty much stopped using it. It continues to exist because my Facebook account is linked to that email. Here is the deal, I am the sorts that rarely checks emails. My last job as a TV journalist involved minimal mailing too. So only recently did the realization hit me – that the first account is a small treasure trove of correspondence that contains the remains of my teenage self.
Yesterday, I was looking for an old short story that I had written when I was probably seventeen and had to go way way back into my outbox list to find it. So glad that my teen self was smart enough to email some of my fiction to myself. I wish I could have done it with all the stuff that I wrote. Sigh.
Not only did I find the short story I was looking for, I also found some more that I absolutely have no memory off. One of them reads like “Goosebumps” met “Mills and Boons”. Hard to decide if that’s a good thing or bad.
But here’s a screenshot of the most interesting email I found amidst all the other nostalgic stuff –
This 2008 email was sent to the ‘Opinion’ team of Deccan Chronicle, a leading south-Indian newspaper. I honestly have no memory of the show. Especially because I pretty much quit watching television in 2011. But there was a time when I was a total couch potato, who consumed a LOT of Bollywood films and shows.
Here is the text of the mail, since the screenshot is not very clear –
‘It is hard to believe that the celebrity participants are actually professionals who work in popular tv serials. They are always ready to pounce on each other and fight at the slightest opportunity. It might be a gimmick for trp’s but it only makes you want to switch to some other lesser irritating show.‘
Got to say, I chuckled at the mail and was proud of my teen self. They did not publish my silly opinion but here’s the fun part – seven years later, I landed a job with the same publication in Mumbai and pretty much headed the online team of Deccan Chronicle.