No Country for Junk Mail

Yesterday, I came across one of those propaganda booklets by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s the sort of booklet that most people would classify in the same category as junk mail, and not deem worthy of a second glance. Not me, though – it rather piqued my curiosity, that booklet. To me, all I’d known about the Jehovah’s Witnesses is that they were the ones that knocked. Not in the cool, badass manner of Walter White in Breaking Bad, but in the sad, pleading, “May I have a moment of your time?” sort of desperate sales pitch manner. So naturally, I was curious to read more and wanted to add to, what was at that point, a single sentence worth of knowledge about an obscure religious denomination. When I thought about it, my knowledge of a lot of other strange American religious denominations was also limited to a single sentence.

The Amish: The religion where everyone grows beards, shuns modern technology and dresses like it’s 19^th century England.

Mormons: The religion where everyone has many wives and lives in Utah.

Scientology: The religion that turned Tom Cruise into a nut job.

The Quakers: Kind of like the Amish, but they make Oats.

Thankfully, the decision to go ahead and read the booklet turned out to be a richly rewarding one. Seldom have I passed a more diverting half hour, and only the fact that multiple crises were piling up on the work front finally pulled me away from the booklet. As far as I could tell, the whole Jehovian religion revolved around a very patient strategy of wait and watch. At some point, the Kingdom of God would be upon us and everything would be sorted out – until then you just hung around and waited. It’s the sort of religion that would make you very nervous if you were an old man, because you’d really want the whole Kingdom of God stuff to happen in your lifetime, otherwise what was the point? The booklet delved in great detail on how corrupt every single government had become, and how it was only the Kingdom of God that could save us from all the corruption, insisting that there was no place for bribes in the Kingdom of God.

Not content with higher order philosophizing, the booklet then delved into the rather more domestic matter of the husband and wife equation, although on this front it lacked the sort of clarity displayed on the Kingdom of God matter. It started on a promising note, stating confidently that a man and a woman were equal partners in a marriage. It promptly contradicted itself by then saying that God had appointed man as the head of the household and he could do as he jolly well pleased because the woman came under the “law of her husband”. Finally, perhaps anticipating a feminist backlash, it ended with admitting that the man could perhaps do a bit more for the woman by being a little more supportive and appreciative.

While I had to get back to work, the booklet made me realize how much I actually missed junk mail in my life. About a decade ago, the junk mail phenomenon was at its peak. From the more prosaic ones about winning the Coca Cola lottery to the more colourful ones involving exotic royalty, a whole lot of people from distant lands were displaying unusually high levels of dogged determination to hoodwink you into giving away your money. Clearly, the junk mail guys had realized that emails had opened up a whole new avenue that could be far more lucrative as the probability of stumbling upon a gullible idiot had gone up a thousand fold, compared to the snail mail days.

Sadly, advanced spam filters mean that I now rarely come across any of them. Sure, while I’m perfectly happy not receiving mails insisting that I enlarge my penis, I was one of the few that actually did end up reading through a lot of my junk mail. For sheer entertainment value, it was well worth the trouble. On the odd occasion, I’d even engage in a spot of correspondence, to see where the whole thing actually went. I’d usually receive warm, highly enthusiastic responses to my mails, with the enthusiasm waning progressively as they realized I was no closer to sharing my account details than I’d been in my first reply.

Without ever falling for it, I always appreciated a long-winded, elaborate story that was concocted to swindle me of my money. At least it felt like someone was going to great lengths and giving it a good old-fashioned go. A representative of a deposed Nigerian prince who would rather share his ill-gotten but tremendous gains with you than give it up to the Nigerian rebels who had overthrown his father’s kingdom. A woman from Scotland who was the accountant to a rich Indian businessman whose entire family tree was killed in a car crash, and hence she was now looking for an Indian man who could claim to be next of kin and share the dead man’s estate with her. A Russian doctor who was looking for a business partner who could get him a rare medicinal product only grown in India that the Russians would pay a killing for. It was all so exotic and outlandish that it made for some great guilty pleasure, like the occasional bad Bollywood movie or clichéd Hollywood romcom. It was a rich tapestry of convoluted chicanery, ingenious skullduggery and foolish optimism that added a touch of colour to a slow workday.

All it needed was a suitably quirky and demented villain, and you could even have yourself a James Bond movie somewhere in there!