At seventeen, when I left home, the only regular mode of connecting to my family and friends was through letters... Landlines were certainly there, but the cost of each call was high.. so people more often than not exchanged letters... Hand-written-letters, enfolding long personal accounts which bore a lot more than the short-sos-type-telephonic conversations could encompass. They were so lovely, so personal, so endearing... I loved writing them and was always thrilled when I received one !! I would read and re-read them and enjoy each reading as if it was the first time.... Letters from my mother, my grandma and a dear friend were the ones I used to wait for the most. While friends have shifted to emailing, ma and grandma have replaced their letters by calls.... but I miss the personal touch, I miss going to the post-office to buy the postcards and the stamps, i miss taking that extra effort to remain connected and mostly I miss the waiting.... the long waiting at the end of which a reward was ensured.... the reward of a letter in my letter box every Friday .... oh! the GOOD old Fridays !!
Emailing is different ! It is not as charming... With emails, you expect an instantaneous reply ..... and check back your inbox every few seconds... now the waits are short and the rewards are small........................
and with reluctance I am learning to budge...
[image by google search]
I could correlate as I used to write
ReplyDeleteletters to my friends to my mother or sister. I still remember those days in college or IIT all the lazy time was so romantic. In a canceled class with that environment suddenly I used to start writing to some of my friends. Yes I could remember the speed post man and the other stuff at the IITB post office.
I do have some memory going to allahabad main post office and HRI campus post office until my family got e-access :)
... but I feel like someone has cut one of my organs. yaah I sfhited to diary and then to emails. But I still write letters. The last one was in June 09, again in a boring lecture at ICTP but I couldn't post it but gave in person rather than sending a scanned copy via email :D
So we are forgetting out expressions specially the romanticism of "letter writting" is fading with times. We are forgetting the our own touch of handwriting. I could still remember at home we used to have a letter hanger where you could see all the postcards from all our relative, specially after durgapuja used to get filled with all the "Bijoya" postcards.
I still remember one incident in IITB. It was a welcome party and during an intro I said my hobby was writing letters. All the people laughed and someone asked me "to whom ??" That was the first time I could feel the world got changed for many of them writing a letter should be for some special occasion and to someone very special.
Yaah, I didn't take a mobile here..:D lets see how long I can survive. I still try to write but I do not get one :(