Spam, bang, no thank you, ma'am!

Friends are people you love, trust, and run rackets with. You also know (and hope) they won’t add to the spam in your life. In flesh and blood, there is some satisfaction in the feelings evoked by joining palms in high fives (from here on referred to as Hi5) with your friends, especially if you are in the West Indies.
However, things have been getting out of hand lately. My inbox is under attack, and my friends don’t know that they are the invaders. I have to find a spam shelter to fight this proxy invasion of email accounts worldwide.
Every afternoon when I step into the matrix, I see at least six emails that proclaim how a friend has invited me to Hi5. Since I am not a West Indian, I don’t dig the idea of people insisting I Hi5 them. Why should I? I haven’t won anything. In fact, I have mostly been losing: memory, youth, female attention, money to tax systems (intricacies of which are akin to Greek) and my patience. There is absolutely no sense in wanting to Hi5 with the markets reeling and an imminent depression. I know I’ll be affected sooner than later though I don’t have a single penny riding on stocks. The point is, there is nothing to Hi5 about. Nobody Hi5ves at a funeral.
Hi5 invites put me in an emotional dilemma because they are so damn enthusiastic. Earlier, I could not bear to be the guy without red blood cells, cold like Count Dracula. So I ended up replying to messages like ‘Hi Santanu! your friend Rahul wants to Hi5 you. Hi Santanu! your friend Sonia wants to Hi5 you. Hi Santanu! your friend Manmohan wants to Hi5 you. Hi Santanu! your friend John wants to Hi5 you and your friend Sarah wants to Hi5 you and your friend Barack wants to Hi5 you’. It would have been politically incorrect not to reply. In my replies, I wrote your usual email, stating: "Don’t you think we should have done that when Abhinav Bindra won the gold, though I have no idea what his sport is all about?" Nobody replied. Apparently, I had sent my reply to a machine, an emotionless entity. The desire to Hi5 actually put me in a weird philosophical position. How do you deal with a machine that writes to you? Does it affirm or negate your being? Basically, the whole 22 yards (since we are a cricketing nation, ‘nine yards’ does not seem the right expression to me) of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential fundas. Is my desire to reply to emails, though I know they are from a machine, over-riding my actual being? Is my belief, that the machine will somehow understand my problem and refrain from spamming me, an act of bad faith (as I know a machine is a being-in-itself and doesn’t derive its existence from my existence and the agnst that follows due to Hi5 invites blah blah blah......)? Those of you who did not get this, don’t bother. I am sure even Sartre didn’t get Sartre.
Hi5 invites are malignant. They started by eating up kilobytes and megabytes, and are now gobbling up gigabytes. Already, Hillary, Bill, Amar, and Mamata have expressed their desire to Hi5 me. In fact, while writing this, I checked my inbox and saw a Hi5 from Priyanka and Rahul. As I see it, this is a real corny way of using the politics of friendship to do business.
In short, everyone wants to Hi5 me. I am pretty sure everyone wants to Hi5 you too, dear readers. I am also sure I may have Hi5ed a thousand people already -- just that I have no idea I have done it. It is like me insulting myself behind my back, if that makes any sense.
The world, if the reality of the inbox is any indication, is turning into Planet Hi5. So, let us fight the invasion. Imagine a world where everyone is happy and Hi5ving... wouldn’t it kill the germ that makes life meaningful? Let us start a campaign to simplify things. Let us call it the ‘Hi5 minus 5’ campaign. It’ll simply mean saying an actual ‘hi’ and moving on with our lives. In any case, why the hell would all of the world want to turn into West Indies? We need some namaskars, a few Nazi and RSS salutes, some oriental bows, a few Latin gesticulations and Qaeda aadabs to keep the ‘I am Ok, You are Ok’ machine going.
All I am saying is, don’t dump Hi5 invites in my inbox. It is a sacred place, not a garbage can. I get holy stuff like credit card bills and sexually explicit forwards on it. So, hi and bye for now.