Those days of meaningless, inane, pointless spamming seem like yesterday. And yet seem like they happened an eternity back.

Here I am, in a strange land where no one understands what I’m saying, much less even a shard of the obscure humour I tend to unleash on companions. Of all the things I miss about IIMK, I miss IP Msg the most.

(It’s not entirely unexpected, I must add, and I’d been doing my bit to wane myself off the addiction before leaving campus. Mostly by staying up into the wee hours, spamming my brains off. Saying anything that anyone would care to listen to. “Spam, spam; you’ve only got 14 days left here.”)

Looking back, everything about IP Msg and the phenomenon that spamming was, seems bizarre, inexplicable, almost from another universe.

That little blinking icon in the taskbar (I swear I willed it to blink so many times, mostly when I was stuck with a large textbook studying for an exam (rare)), the meaningless case-taking (five minutes later, in a magnanimous free for all, everyone had lost track of whose case was being taken; no ganging up, no groupism, it was every man for himself (mostly) in the merciless IP universe), smartass retorts to serious questions (“What’s for dinner tonight?”, “C-R-A-P!” (in graphic detail (thanks RG))), serious retorts to meaningless questions (“Looking for Chettaman..”, “Last seen struggling to get through a Classic Milds near Commercial Plaza.”).

It seems slightly bizarre now; 25-year old, hale and hearty young men and women of a steady constitution investing so much time into something as inane as spamming. It’s so difficult to get answers to all the (cold) logical questions that corporate life teaches one to ask.

It was an incredibly effective vent. I used it often to rid myself of my frustration by letting myself go on IP. Safe in the belief that whatever I said could be (and would be) used against me at some point of time in the future. But it didn’t seem to matter. There were 200 people with no option (mostly) but to read what you were dishing out. That kind of willing audience is difficult to get, and even more difficult to resist.

Back then, I never asked myself why I (we) spammed. It seemed like a natural, involuntary part of life. Does anyone ask why we breathe?

It is only now that I ask myself why. Corporate life is polluting me (calling knights in shining armour to undertake rescue operations), and making me ask (cold) logical questions that have no clear bullet-point answers. I don’t want to ask these questions (even beginning to answer them is akin to insulting them, their beauty, their complexity), and I need the answers even less so.

But the mind charts its own course, running along and looking for answers even when you don’t want it to.

So why did we spam?