Hillery Dillery Dock, Obama will Clean her Clock, Monica's a Sin, Bu Ba fell in, Now she's gotta deal with Obama.
US Presidential nominee Barack Obama may have beaten Hillary Clinton but he has lost a Gmail id by his name. Now a young Indian-American owns barakobama@gmail.com. Prerna Kumar reports.
Four years ago Guru Raj got an invitation from a friend to create a new Gmail account. But when Raj, then a university student tried the obvious options with his name he discovered that both were already taken. On a whim the 21-year-old keyed in the name of a young and then relatively unknown politician Senator Barack Obama- after seeing him on TV. Some moments later barackobama@gmail.com was born.
"I was watching the democratic national convention and he was speaking and I was surprised gururaj@gmail.com was taken and so instead tried barrack obama@gmail.com and much to my surprise it worked," says Guru Raj.
But little did Raj realise that the Illinois Senator would go on to become one of the most famous Presidential candidates in American history. And so by 2007 when Obama announced his candidacy for President, Raj's inbox began to flood with hundreds of misdirected messages for the Senator.
E-mails ranged from invites to party's campaign advice to and jibes at Hillary Clinton. Like a poem from Mike that reads "Hillery Dillery Dock, Obama will Clean her Clock, Monica's a Sin, Bu Ba fell in, Now she's gotta deal with Obama."
Raj however says, the most exciting ones come from rest of the world.
"I've got emails ranging from Turkmenistan, to Puerto Rico to India as well. A lot of traffic from India. There's a lot of excitement at the idea that Obama's face and persona is different from a majority of people who've run for President in the past," Raj adds.
Raj, who now works for a software consulting company in Washington, D.C., has not forwarded any messages to the Barack Obama campaign. However, he says that he does not intend to close the account and will check messages periodically to see if he received any interesting emails.