Times are a changing

My email; SMS; whatsapp; BBM and all form of messaging boxes have been inundated with hundreds of messages carrying best wishes and good tidings for Diwali and New Year. Honestly; apart from the few I really care about - the rest - mostly from marketing e-bots fed with big data about me will go directly to my trash box as they don't need any reply or acknowledgement.

It's only now that I have noticed that I haven't received a single card via the postal or courier service. Thankful I am, for a couple of reasons; - first, I don't have to open them physically to see who they are from; second, no waste of precious paper and printing ink; and third no guilt of responding back in kind. It always felt cheap to respond back to a physical card sender with some form of e-greetings or e-acknowledgement. From a thriving money making industry, conveying of greetings through creative, time consuming and expensive cards has become a virtually free and relatively effortless task. In this age of CCP (Cut Copy Paste) one does not even spend time looking for a great original creative piece of work - just take something cool received - edit it to make it look personal (if possible) and forward to your own mailing list or respond back with a template reply.

I cannot decide if it's good or bad. Thanks to technology I have mapped my friends' birthdays, anniversaries, and such important dates - even if they are incorrect based on data entered by the source. It's good to remember people even for a split second - but does that really translate to care? At times wishing someone on a social network results in acute irritation from the alerts when others too have greeted that person. Does it give us a high to receive greetings from tons of people - many who we don't even know?

I still hold on to a few physical greeting cards that touched me emotionally; but I don't recall holding on to or printing a single e-card sent to me. We now click and share more pictures and probably leave them forgotten on social sites. There are those days when I go through my physical picture albums, scrap books and cards - hardly ever through my cherished memories on any e-platform. Its either there in my mind or somewhere out there. Times are changing - but I do hope in this age of e-junk we are able to sift through and recognise the messages of real care and respond accordingly. May be even call for a conversation rather than send back words with one of the few billion emoticons.