Sanjay Sircar | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 27, 2002

Reading Jean-Bruno Renard’s item in Letters to Ambrose Merton 25 prompted the following comment. The Indian postal services were once remarkably good in delivering letters with incomplete addresses, etc., though nowadays they are said to be particularly unreliable – sometimes they are deliberately so, what with the rise of the much more expensive courier services, which may pay postal employees for such subversion. I first heard this from an India expatriate, Canberra 2000.

Be that as it may, English language chain letters were not uncommon in India. The first time I saw one was in the mid 1960s, when my sister Kanika Sircar brought one home from school (Loreto House, Calcutta), I think anonymously deposited in her desk. I remember my mother Mrs Rani Sircar laughingly reassuring her about the blackmailing threat that such letters used to have embedded in them, that bad misfortune would befall if they were not passed on. My sister (l3 years old or younger) was a little rattled by this threat, and the awful example in this letter was the Indian case of V K. Krishna Menon, a politician whose downfall this letter attributed to him not passing the letter on.

In relation to this threat, the contradiction of such letters purporting to spread love and goodwill over the world and to bring incredible good luck to participants while simultaneously threatening dire punishment if the recipient did of obey seems rarely remarked upon by people who receive them; at any rate, the threat still seems to work. A very intelligent Danish academic was intimidated enough by the receipt of such a letter at the University of Queensland in the mid 1980s to do the commanded passing on, attempting to retain anonymity, though his ecological sensibilities caused him to use reusable “internal envelopes” which had his name above that of the people he sent it to, so he was found out. A similar case occurred in the 1990s in relation to an internet chain letter, when an American doctoral student friend of mine, in that state of acute superstitiousness which overcomes one just before thesis submission, obeyed the command and apologised to those she sent it to across the world (for Internet anonymity while easy, is less easy than written anonymity).

Today, there are some of us, like myself and a few friends of mine who have followed my lead, who very occasionally pass on such internet chain letters if their content seems interesting but add the initial caveat that the present sender specifically cancels all requirements to pass the letter on, and that no excessive bad luck has befallen as a result of doing so in the past (which is true).

Thus we have mutations in this non-narrative folk-transmitted form. I want to draw attention to another feature of such mutation over time and space — a phenomenon perhaps peculiar to the late twentieth-century and following (or at any rate more common than before), which I call “diasporic emigre oikotypification”, whereby the internet allows the core of ihe English-language chain letter to remain, along with the promise of good luck as an equivalent of the standard threat, but not only adds an Indian “awful example” as chain letters on paper used to do, but a distinct South Asian frame to a foreign-originated core. In relation to South Asians, the internet chain letter is perhaps more used by the more moneyed diasporic segments of the South Asian diaspora, particularly in the U.S.A., than poorer and thus less advanced Indians in India. Such communities of NRIs – Non Resident Indians, when Hindu, are often supporters of Hindu culture via “cultural” internet sites (and sometimes supporters also of the Hindu fundamentalism which threatens other Indians such as the Indian Christion minority), and chain letters evoking Hinduism might carry particular weight with them.

Here is one such English-language chain letter that I was sent on 7 July 2001, which probably originated in the U.S.A., which oikotypifies, culturally domesticates, what is (very probably) U.S. content, in attaching it to an Asian cultural frame. It was sent to me in Australia via my friend Ms Anjana Basu India, who also simultaneously sent it to others — Indians in India and non-South Asians in other parts of the world (I have cut and pasted it just as I received it, spelling mistates and all — the > markers seem to indicate that the form in which I received it has been cut and pasted twice before.) Note that despite its claim to have originated in India, it is probably of US origin. The evidence lies in the references to New York, silk paper wrapped package etc., in the core, which is probably of a piece with the American moral it preaches (approximately that it is necessary to “take time off to smell the roses”). The ungrammatical oddity of “clothings” does not indicate an original Indian author, though people in the U.K. who believe in the accuracy of Peter Sellers might like to think it does. It omits the standard chain-letter threat, retaining only the promise of good fortune, in the form of incremental good luck in proportion to the number of future recipients, though the phrase “must leave your hands” bears traces of the threat built into the genre. Few Indians in India would probably accept that the material constitutes, as it claims, a “Tantra” (mystical enigmatic sacred text, often involving prescriptions for the practice of “sacred sex’). It might work for some Indians in India (of that class in which cultural deracination goes with superstition). But it is likely that the identification as a “Tantra” and as “Indian” originated from somewhere within the South Asian diaspora, end was later added to the main text, and that it is more likely to work on the sensibilities of emigre Hindu NRIs than Indians in India (Hindu or otherwise).

Take Hold of Every Moment

A friend of mine opened his wife’s drawer and picked up paper wrapped package:
> >
> > “This, – he said — isn’t any ordinary package.”
> > He unwrapped the box and stared at both the silk paper and the box.
> >
> > “She got this he first time we went to New York, 8 or 9 years ago. She has never put it on. Was saving it for a special occasion.
> > Well, I guess this is it. He got near the bed and placed the gift box next to the other clothings he was taking to the funeral house, his wife had just died. He turned to me and said:
> >
> > “Never save something for a special occasion. Every day in your life special occasion”. > >I still think those words changed my life.
> > Now read more and clean !ess.
> > I sit on the porch without worrying about anything.
> > I spend e time with my family, and less at work.
> > I understood that life should be a source of experience to be lived up to, not survived through. I no longer keep onything. I use crystal glasses every day. I’ll wear new clothes to go to the supermarket, if i feel like it.
> > I don’t save any special perfume for special occasions, I use it whenever I want to. The words “Someday…” and “One Day…” are fading away from my dictionary. If it’s worth seeing listening or doing, I want to see, listen or do it now. I don’t know what my friend’s wife would have done if she knew she wouldn’t be there the next morning, this nobody can tell. I think she might have called her relatives and closest friends.
> > She might call old friends to make peace over past quarrels. I’d like to think she would go out for Chinese, her favourite food. It’s these small things that I would regret not doing, if I knew my time had come.
> > I would regret it, because I would no longer see the friends I would meet, letters… letters that i wanted to write “One of this days”
> > I would regret and feel sad, because I didn’t say to my brothers and sons, not times enough at leastt, how much I hove them.
> > Now, I try not to delay, postpone or keep anything that could bring laughter and joy into our lives.
> > And, on each morning, I say to myself that this could be a special day.
> > Each day, each hour, each minute, is special.
> > If you got this, it’s because someone cares for you and because, probably, there’s someone you care about.
> > If you’re too busy to send this out to other people and you say to yourself that you will send it “One of these days”, remember that “One day” is far away… or might never come…
> >
> > This TANTRA came from India. No matter if you’re superstitious or not, spend some time reading it.
> > It holds useful messages for the soul.
> > Don’t keep this message.
> > This Tantra must leave your hands within 96 hours.
> > Send copies and watch what goes on in the next four days.
> > You’ll have a pleasent surprise.
> >
> > This is true, even if you’re not superstitious.
> > Now, here’s the fun of it:
> > send this message to at least 5 people and you’re life improves.
> >
> > 0-4 people: your life improves slightly.
> > 5-9 people: your life imnproves according to your expectations!
> > 9-14 people: you’ll have at least 5 surprises in the next 3 weeks.
> > 15 or more people: your life improves drastically and your dreams start to take shape. > >