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The Couple Diaries have been on a long hiatus – I was shocked to see the date of the last post as 2015! Blame it on some laziness, some severe writers block, and also hitting a life stage where all couples around you are getting neatly divided into two distinct categories – either having babies and disappearing from the world for a while (Facebook doesn’t count), or undergoing separation and disappearing from the world for a while. Hence no fodder for a post, neither being subjects known to generate the kind of pep which I usually like to inject into the diaries (well I could, but I don’t think the world is ready yet – also I’d be left with no friends).Ok if the above seemed like lame excuses, they totally are…so time to dust off some of the cobwebs that have gathered here – and get straight down to it.This is dedicated to the “sandwich generation” (a term coined after one of those parties where everyone is sufficiently drunk to start discussing life and the universe) – who transitioned effortlessly from foreboding black “landline telephones” with their metal smell, to “cordless” phones (regarded as the height of luxury and technology in their time), to clunky qwerty mobiles (usually belonging to Dad and guarded jealously), to sleek “smartphones” which got smaller and smaller – and then, weirdly jumped to larger and wider screens ‘for your viewing pleasure’. The same generation who surfed the cassette-CD-MP3-Ipod wave, and lived to tell the tale. The same generation who have nightmares about a dark age before “cable TV”, and the sole Doordarshan channel. And the last generation who will remember the whooooosh sound of a dial-up modem connecting, when life as they knew it changed in the late nineties, as the Internet came into households. And where sometimes the novelty of a simple 2-line email sparked off a love story.Most kids of the sandwich generation would have a forgotten hotmail or yahoo account lying somewhere, and some of the more adventurous ones would even have an aol one as well! And many would have found, at the very least, a good friend in the exciting world of Perch (if you don’t recognize this then this isn’t for you), ICQ (ok most are still clueless at this point) or Yahoo Messenger (now I see you nodding in agreement). No, Gtalk came much later but given it’s all-pervasive nature, let it be included in the records. Speaking of which, the best and worst part of these “digital connections” is that everything stays recorded. So unless an insecure girlfriend or jealous husband “accidentally” read the chronicles documenting the follies of your youth, resulting in you speedily deleting them forever from the annals of time, chances are they are still saved in those long-forgotten accounts. And if they include conversations with your current partner (since this IS the ‘couple diaries’), then it would be most fun to dig them out when you have nothing better to do on some rainy afternoon. Here is what you might be surprised to find:

  • You have not changed, not one bit. And neither have they. Whatever be your status today, the basics remain – the good, bad and ugly of it.
  • Everything you wanted to know about the person is there in those initial conversations. Whether you paid close attention or not at that time is a different matter – but re-read them and you’ll find yourself nodding in agreement, or marveling how you missed something then which bothers you even today.
  • You will gag (ok, at least cringe) at how idiotically mushy you were. But what is even funnier, it hits you that you would be exactly the same the second time round.
  • There will be some “stories” which your partner is still telling at parties which you heard in those first few conversations! This can be cutely exasperating or downright annoying depending on your mood on that day
  • Looking at the timestamps, you will wonder, did you ever sleep? And how did you manage to get through classes/office with so much sleep-deprivation is the real mystery.
  • The people you mentioned first to your partner in those initial days (be it family or friends) will likely still be in your life, and as important.
  • You remember (or rather read it in black-and-white) how often you would say (or type) the same thing at the same time – you probably still think it, but don’t end up saying it as much.
  • While rummaging through these, you will also stop by conversations with friends (some still there, some faded into oblivion), ex-loves, almost-beens, if-onlys…you get the drift. These are equally precious…they all have a little bit of you as you were then.
  • You will be amazed and incredulous at the amount you could and would talk. And you’ll wonder did you just have more time, or did you just have more words?
  • Sifting through the never-ending chronicles, you will discover that one conversation – the day you knew and they knew, and you both knew that the other knows. And the watershed moment where everything became topsy-turvy, and yet made more sense than anything ever did.

After you have read that conversation (and re-read it, let’s not kid ourselves!), you won’t want to read anything further that day. But you will smile more indulgently the next time you hear that same old story again at the next party, and you will say it out loud when you are thinking the same line in your head as he/she is. Born of the sandwich generation, and borne the digital revolution, your story is documented in scraps and fragments across time (stamps) and (cyber) space. Your very own memory-palace – and you don’t need to be Sherlock to access it (just remember to remember your old passwords).