A lot of attention is paid to the increasing number of people trying to get onto the bandwagon of backward castes, with their attendant windfall of job reservations and other goodies. But the rise of a new forward caste is overlooked, even though it affects our day-to-day lives.This new working class or caste is forward in the literal sense of the term in that it is made up of those who tirelessly keep forwarding recycled jokes, news titbits, videos, and other miscellanea to anyone and everyone whose email id or smartphone number they happen to have.They are the digital age avatars of the chain letter circulators who’d initiate an ever-enlarging postal chain reaction by exhorting the recipients of the letter to keep the assembly line of correspondence going like a perpetual motion machine.
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“Send this letter to 30 people. If you do, you’ll get a triple promotion in your job and win the lottery even though you didn’t buy a ticket for it. If you don’t, your jobless brother-in-law will take up permanent residence with you, and you’ll be diagnosed with terminal halitosis.”No one knows how and why chain letters started. Were they a ploy by the postal people to make more money by selling more stamps?Then the postal system, at least in India, became virtually defunct, so chain letters died a natural death.They were reborn as digital forwards. Unlike chain letters, forwards don’t bribe/threaten you to keep forwarding the forwards. However, like a snowball rolling downhill, forwards gain mass and momentum on their own.This is made evident in that most, if not all, forwards carry the notification ‘Forwarded many times’.Why do forwarders keep recycling old forwards? Oughtn’t such retro forwards really be called backwards? Or maybe sidewards?Undaunted by such quibbles, or niggly-noo distinctions, the cyberspace caste carries on regardless. Forward march!
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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