Email encounters of the other kind!

I get emails — almost anyone who exists in the virtual world gets emails — even when they do not share that email address with anyone, they still get emails from a Nigerian investor wanting to invest in their business and their email provider's admin. I, unlike other people, get weird emails and I am not talking about spam here.

The emails I get are all not just unusual — they are the kind that make you pause, reread, and wonder what on earth prompted someone to hit send. Over the years, I've collected a small but memorable assortment of these messages, and they reveal something about the strange intersections of the internet, cultural assumptions, and human longing.

Among the most persistent are marriage proposals from men in India. These aren't the boilerplate spam you'd expect — some are surprisingly detailed, complete with family backgrounds, career summaries, and earnest declarations of intent. One gentleman wrote at length about his admiration for Pakistani women and his conviction that cross-border matrimony was a path to peace. Another simply asked if I would consider relocating to Bangalore.

Then there are the requests for Urdu tuition. People find my writing, note that I speak Urdu fluently, and assume I can — and want to — teach them the language. I cannot teach Urdu grammar. Speaking a language and teaching its formal structure are two entirely different skills, and I lack the latter. Yet the emails keep coming, polite and hopeful, from students and enthusiasts across the world.

What ties these messages together is a kind of optimistic reaching-out — a belief that the internet can collapse distance, culture, and circumstance into something manageable. It's touching and, at times, deeply strange. I don't reply to most of them, but I do read every one.