Friends, there’s a popular e-mail story doing the rounds on the forwards circuit these days by the title of “The 99 Club”. I’m not going to reproduce the same here as most of you may have read it already but I do want to use it as a preamble to what I have to explain later in my diary post. I will therefore, recount it here for the benefit of those who haven’t read it in as small a jist as I can.  

In the palaces of a king, there was once a lowly servant who always seemed to be very happy. He would go around the place doing his chores of cleaning the floors or dusting the windows with a song on his lips and a bounce in his step. The King could never understand the logic and reasoning of his happiness and was in a way jealous of that servant. So he consulted his wisest advisors and explained to them his predicament. They advised him only one thing, make him a part of the “99 Club”. Now what’s the 99 club, the king enquired? To demonstrate, the wise counselor kept a bag containing 99 gold coins in front of the door of the servant’s house. When the servant discovered so many gold coins he was overwhelmed with joy. He took the bag inside and counted and recounted the coins. Only 99, he thought. What happened to the last coin? Surely no one would give him 99 coins. He went out and searched again, but could not find the last coin. He was very frustrated, but determined to work hard, save money and collect that last coin to complete his beautiful collection.  

From that day his life changed, he was overworked, scolded his wife and children for not working hard enough and lost his sleep. The wise councilor then declared in total satisfaction. “Your highness, the servant has now officially joined the 99 club”.  

But what relevance does this have to what I have to say further in this post. Well it’s like this. There was once a time when we used to write reviews and would be very happy to have it rated VU. The comments were a big bonus. In fact I had not even written a single review after joining MS on 30.4 06 right up to 15.11.07, and was only content in reading and commenting on others reviews!  

However everything changed with this new format of Diary posts and gifts. Kweldebs sent me the first ever gift as an appreciation of my reviews. And boy was I elated. Like a little kid who has just received his first racing car! And soon this became quite a practice, sending and receiving gifts. Can anyone forget the famous gift of the Airplane costing a whopping 30000 points to FE by Rohitthebest? What an interest that generated. I cannot help but mention another interesting episode that I happened to notice. One member cool_sun, saw Veekeey’s profile flashing as a star writer and went to the same. She incidentally saw all medicine gifts there that day, as Vee was feeling unwell and Smita had mentioned that in her post. However cool_sun had no background in the matter but seeing all medicines assumed that he needed more and without even knowing Vee sent him medicines! When I went to Vee’s profile page to check if he had received the medicines that I had sent him and also to see if there was any activity and consequently if he was feeling better, I happened to read cool_suns message to Vee. Her gesture inspired me so much that I too without knowing her, sent her a gift for gifting medicines to my friend!!  

Almost all my friends have given me gifts, and I cherish all of them. I too on my part have probably sent gifts to all I know here. If I missed out someone, Pl do forgive me. I do not want to mention any name here as I will not be able to cover all the 95 gifts and the ones who I miss out will feel bad. But I must add that all gifts irrespective of the value are very special and I use this post to thank all my friends who have sent them to me, including one from Faisal. In fact I advocate that we send gifts of lesser value so that more people and gifts can be covered in lesser points, as there is always a debit and credit issue to be taken care of.  

So friends now coming back to the issue of the 99 club, I now have 95 gifts (95 I may add is not much different from 99) and would like to complete my collection of 100. So what say, return gifts are assured!