From ‘ASL Pls’ To Emoji’s

I don’t get tired; no really, I do not get tired or bored at all narrating our story to anyone. Infact every new person I meet, I try to grab this opportunity to talk about us – You and I!  And I surprise myself when I realise that I still remember it all so well. Every single detail of 4 years of friendship, 4 years of long-distance relationship, and 7 years of being married. Well, can’t really say that about the last 7 years :P, but the first 8 years are like embedded in my DNA.

Pic clicked by Sudipto Roy

I think our story is unique. It’s beautiful. Just 15 years old but so much has changed in this one and half-decade. Or not much?

After all our story started off even before the Instagram & Facebook & Orkut era. Yes, Orkut too! It was the virtual room of Yahoo Chat! that sealed our fate.

Somewhere between Yahoo Chat! and WhatsApp video call, we both grew up. Somewhere between ‘ASL Pls’* ‘and emojis’ we both grew up.

Today’s Instagram & TikTok generation will probably not understand the thrill of chatting with a stranger in a virtual room with a pseudo name and vectored DP. They will certainly not identify with the pain of the endless wait of the never-ending browsing symbol on internet explorer; and they will definitely not understand the value of Rs. 25/- per hour of using the internet at a cybercafé.

I think it was amazing, that phase.

Do you remember how we started off? 

On February 14^th, 2005 ‘BlackbeadedSaint’ pinged ‘AnnSinn_5’ in a virtual room titled ‘reading’… and that’s where the journey began. You covered the distance from BlackbeadedSaint to Varun N Rao to Varun to ‘hny’; while I travelled from AnnSinn_5 to Anugya Sinha to Anu to ‘babu’.

Haven’t we travelled a lot far in the last 15 years? It’s a lifetime. Yet it feels like we have just begun.

While the world celebrates Valentine’s day on Feb 14^th, we celebrate friendship day – Our Friendship day!

Today, when I look back at that silly girl sitting in a cybercafé in Mumbai, casually chatting with a stranger from an engineering college in Hospet, I want to go back and tell her, ‘Listen, you don’t know but this is the moment that will change your life. You surely don’t realise this, but this half an hour is one of the best times of your life.’

That girl, 15 years back, wouldn’t believe me if I would have said, this stranger whose name and face you are unaware of, is your soulmate and you will be spending your entire life with him. She would have laughed it off. But then such was the day and age then; and we – the simple people didn’t really expect such filmy or fairy tale events to happen with us. Finding love on the internet is nothing unusual today, but in 2005, it certainly was a big deal. Our story was interesting. It made me do things those were beyond my own expectations.

Yes, we experienced our share of struggles back then, but those 8 years, as I look back, were the most beautiful phase of my life, or so I would like to believe.

*ASL Pls - age, sex, location pls. This was how the chat with a stranger usually started off in Yahoo chat.