I got an email from a friend in Chennai, I quote verbatim:

“seepa tho i dont write often to u ..U know i am there to tell happy and sad events…we just saw in paper that R and RVS and RS..all 3 of whom u know well …passed away…just keepin u informed…i opened mail box to write and tell u when i see a brief mail frm R that she is rushing back frm usa today”

The background…just last week, a friend of ours died suddenly, in a car crash in Korea..five people died in the accident.

RVS, R, and RS are siblings, and R and RS are particularly close friends of mine…so you can imagine what I felt when I saw this email. RS lives in Tanzania, and R,who lives in Chennai, often visits her daughter in Chicago…so I was wondering if all of them had been together for a wedding or something and had a bad traffic accident….the newspaper headlines, which I desperately googled, didn’t carry anything that indicated such a terrible event…

But wait, I thought: in the very next sentence, she writes that R is rushing back from USA….how confusing…but it also gave me some hope that it was not, after all, a terrible tragedy.

So I called my sis in law in Chennai and asked her to look at the local newspaper…and heaved a HUGE sigh of relief when I realized that it was their MOTHER (old and ailing) who had passed away in Chennai.

Frankly, for about an hour after I realized what had happened, I would not have minded inserting an obit announcement for the abovementioned friend , the one who emailed me and spoilt my entire morning!

I do wish she would write emails properly, and that she had READ what she wrote before sending it off.

And yes, at such times, I hate the way people use SMS lingo in emails, too. I suppose the practice of typing “gr8” and “u” and “r” because they may be charged if their character counts exceeds a certain number…carries over into all other forms of communication too!

Call me old-fashioned….but I want an email that talks of a bereavement to be “properly” written….but I guess that dates me.