The Pen... still... is mightier...
She turned the pages to begin a new chapter, as we sat down together to do her weekend activity with this book on “Writing Skills”… this new chapter was about ‘Letter Writing’ and the instantaneous thought was ‘is this even relevant’? may be not, but then, no harm in going through this I thought… even today, it had those same letter types and formats – starting with contact info, then the subject line, greeting, letter body, closing, signature etc… as we went through them, popped up the first question “mamma, what does ‘yours sincerely’ or ‘yours truly’ even mean? Why not end the letters with Smileys?”… next few minutes, we had some very imaginative discussions on these letters… she came up with ideas on how we could use doodles, designs, emoticons, collage, colors while writing these… her concepts got me interested, so I asked her if she wanted to give it a shot… hand-write a letter to someone…
But the question here was whom to write these letters to now? Will anyone understand or appreciate, forget reciprocate… I remember, in my growing up years, we used to get many letters from our relatives, either on those ochre yellow thick post cards, or sealed in those blue color thin paper inland letters… one of the weekend activities would be to reply to those letters… but then those were the days when even a phone line was maybe a couple of kilometers away… I myself used to sit on the kitchen floor and write letters to my cousins, taking my mom’s help on spellings and grammar… mistakes were minimal or rather ignored, as the space was precious and ‘delete’ was not an option then… I vividly remember an aunt of mine writing letters to my mom, occasionally, but very meticulously… they used to be on postcards and every millimeter of that card would be filled in her pictographic handwriting… that one small card conveyed a lot, it informed us of her and her family’s well-being, enquired about ours, showered praises on my mom’s cooking, shared snippets of her daily routine, expressed happiness on family events, also her worry on some family matters, her dreams and wishes and bountiful of blessings for fulfilling ours… there was some message in there for each one of us and we would read that letter again and multiple times over again… even without any creative content embedded into them, they used to be as fascinating then… the feeling of closeness and belonging came just from the words… unfortunately though, we did not preserve those letters then, not knowing that such forms of communication will be ‘extinct’ in due course… I really am curious now to know the quantity of such post cards and inland letters that post office manages to sell today, if at all they do…
Letter writing kind of evolved with time, with stationers selling special papers, writing pads and envelopes for writing letters… in various designs, sizes and colours… available for all occasions, but a major hit with the ‘love-letter’ category… they also had scented papers then… infact I was completely in awe of this Pen-friend my brother had in Germany who would send him letters on ‘scented papers’ and the fact that they retained their fragrance all the way from Germany to India was itself a miracle to me… this Pen-friend was a great concept in our times introduced by Readers Digest (our only window to the world), where you write to that magazine with your co-ordinates… someone somewhere in some distant country could pick your address and write to you… thereon you become Pen-friends and communicate through letters… like I spied on everything my brother did then, I did secretly read these letters too… this Pen-friend of his, along with her long, beautifully written letters, would send her family pics, her beach holiday pics, would narrate about the fireworks in some mountains nearby there, or about a drive into some forest… she had researched about India and its glory and had a host of questions too for my brother… I could never see the letters my brother wrote to her, but I doubt if he could write even half as interesting stuff as hers… eventually, they discontinued…
She nudged me out of my thoughts, and echoed the same thoughts to me “mamma, whom do I write a letter to but? And what do I write in it? I speak to everyone everyday”… now I did not have a ready answer to her question… its true that video calls and chats have changed the entire communication canvas.. the writing styles and patterns have also changed dramatically… but without sticking to the rules of ‘truly’ and ‘sincerely’, I still want her to ‘write’ a letter to someone, and feel that unmatched exhilaration when she finds a hand-written letter from that someone in the letter box… with a ‘to-do’ created in my mind, we moved on to the next chapter then… The mental note remained etched and so today as I stepped into a stationery shop, I found myself buying some hand-made writing papers, and colored envelopes along with some sketch pens, stickers and laces for embellishment… I did ‘write’ a letter to a special person today, will now eagerly wait for her to write back, and in the process have inspired my daughter to write one too… it is indeed time to revive that extinct form of communication, learn to express through a new (rather old) medium, enhance a contour of ‘creative writing’, enrich it with imagination and get to experience that ‘conventional’ happiness…
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