If there are so many people in a gathering and everyone shakes everyone else's hands, how many handshakes are there in all? Thus goes the famous riddle that most of us have come across when learning the Arithmetic Series. A good thing about handshakes is that whether you take the lead and shake the other person's hands or the other seizes the lead, once the hands are shaken you are done. Goodwishes are more demanding. When one person has taken the lead, the other must reciprocate. Thus, the answer to the riddle mentioned in the beginning, would have to be doubled if it was goodwishes instead of handshakes!
Again, while while you can shake hands only with an individual, you can greet people individually, or in groups - small and large, regional and national, local and global, friends and colleagues, family and acquaintances et al. Of course any individual is quite likely to figure in more than one of your groups and so each one gets greeted multiple times by the same individual and feels obliged to respond as many times. Add to this the multiplicity of channels, greeting in person, greeting through a voice call, greetings through SMS, Whatsapp, Facebook, Google+ and what have you. The multiplication factor for the answer to the original riddle goes up by a few orders of magnitude! Luckily cards are going out of vogue and that means one fewer channel.
If you are already nodding your head in agreement, it shows that you have experienced firsthand the deluge caused by festivals that open the floodgates for pent up goodwishes. If the goodwishes were to materialize, the world would be instantly turned into something vastly superior to heavens of our imagination. But instead what happens is this. Subscriptions to special rate SMS packs are suspended, voice calls get dropped, the broadband bandwidth gets choked and photos, animations, and videos clog the storage space on your electronic communication device.
There does exist a solution to this overload. It is inspired by banks who have hugely simplified interbank transactions by promoting credit push in place of debit pull. The proposed solution will replace push with pull instead. This would drastically reduce the number of greetings by limiting it to just the number of persons who wish to greet each other. And it is simple! Let there be a greetings registry. All greeters must register here. Now if one wishes to greet others on a particular occasion, he can put his greeting on the site. The site will not push it to anyone. Instead whoever so wants, will have to pull it. So I log into the registry, and ask for Dipawali greeting from my friend X. If he has posted a greeting, the greeting is personalized with my registered name and shown to me. Those who post greetings can also be given the facility of a associating a negative list (to deny greetings to a few chosen people) or a positive list (if the greeting is meant only for a single persons or a few persons.)
One problem with this suggestion is that bosses, wives, and OGFs (Opposite Gender Friends) may feel offended if the greeting addresses them with just their registered names unqualified by any superlatives. Hopefully they can take it in their stride.
And so, dear readers, pending creation of this registry, I dedicate this post to each one of you and wish you a very Happy Dipawali and a New Year filled with joy, prosperity and good health. (This is in addition to my SMS, Whatsapp, FB and Google+ greetings!) The fact that you have read this post is reciprocation enough.
Again, while while you can shake hands only with an individual, you can greet people individually, or in groups - small and large, regional and national, local and global, friends and colleagues, family and acquaintances et al. Of course any individual is quite likely to figure in more than one of your groups and so each one gets greeted multiple times by the same individual and feels obliged to respond as many times. Add to this the multiplicity of channels, greeting in person, greeting through a voice call, greetings through SMS, Whatsapp, Facebook, Google+ and what have you. The multiplication factor for the answer to the original riddle goes up by a few orders of magnitude! Luckily cards are going out of vogue and that means one fewer channel.
If you are already nodding your head in agreement, it shows that you have experienced firsthand the deluge caused by festivals that open the floodgates for pent up goodwishes. If the goodwishes were to materialize, the world would be instantly turned into something vastly superior to heavens of our imagination. But instead what happens is this. Subscriptions to special rate SMS packs are suspended, voice calls get dropped, the broadband bandwidth gets choked and photos, animations, and videos clog the storage space on your electronic communication device.
There does exist a solution to this overload. It is inspired by banks who have hugely simplified interbank transactions by promoting credit push in place of debit pull. The proposed solution will replace push with pull instead. This would drastically reduce the number of greetings by limiting it to just the number of persons who wish to greet each other. And it is simple! Let there be a greetings registry. All greeters must register here. Now if one wishes to greet others on a particular occasion, he can put his greeting on the site. The site will not push it to anyone. Instead whoever so wants, will have to pull it. So I log into the registry, and ask for Dipawali greeting from my friend X. If he has posted a greeting, the greeting is personalized with my registered name and shown to me. Those who post greetings can also be given the facility of a associating a negative list (to deny greetings to a few chosen people) or a positive list (if the greeting is meant only for a single persons or a few persons.)
One problem with this suggestion is that bosses, wives, and OGFs (Opposite Gender Friends) may feel offended if the greeting addresses them with just their registered names unqualified by any superlatives. Hopefully they can take it in their stride.
And so, dear readers, pending creation of this registry, I dedicate this post to each one of you and wish you a very Happy Dipawali and a New Year filled with joy, prosperity and good health. (This is in addition to my SMS, Whatsapp, FB and Google+ greetings!) The fact that you have read this post is reciprocation enough.
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