W
e have come a long way. The internet, the mobile telephony and all have carried us ahead in time as far as communication is concerned. We have come a long way from scripting letters. The post offices which used to be the hubs of communication decades ago are out of vogue. We are just a “click away” from our relatives, friends and associates. A single click, or perhaps half a dozen and we are face to face with whosoever we want to talk to, courtesy, online web conferencing which comes free nowadays. No matter whether your loved and cherished ones live in the farthest corners of the world, you are always in touch. No need to script letters with love and care and post them and wait for “eons” till the letters reach the recipients.
I loved writing letters. I was always looking for postal addresses of friends and acquaintances and as soon as I had one, I would write a letter and post it to them. There was great intrigue and emotion involved in the whole affair. I would wait for replies and check my post box every day. I figure that writing letters was an “intellectual” practice as one had to be very cautious while writing letters; you had to craft sentences creatively in order to turn your feelings into words, keep track of the grammar and handwriting, although my hand writing was always messy. Things changed over the decades as I grew up. Nowadays, we have email, web chatting, social networking, mobile telephony and what not and who cares about the grammar. We have created a shortcut resource of language and words have been minted into emoticons and else. And there is almost no delay at all; while you are typing, the words have already reached the intended recipient. But there is no fun attached to this “Gen-X” communication, not much emotion. Words in the modern world have almost been rendered “valueless”.
As a keen letter writer, I was much in demand in my old days. Friends would approach me to write letters for them, mostly meant for intended girlfriends and all and I must confess that letters written by me did the trick for them. Tailor-crafted letters that churned on emotions for all my friends and at no cost at all, those were the times. I thoroughly enjoyed this craft of writing letters and now miss this wonderful activity. I would still be writing letters by hand and posting them but who would have the nerve to anticipate and thereafter read a letter. No one, I guess. I figure I can still write letters to myself? Well, that sounds kind of silly but worth an attempt.
I used to buy beautiful stationery for my letters and some of my known associates preserved these letters for some time. It was an altogether different world then, I would say. Letter writing was an art that served you a purpose. These days when you can dial a number and convey your feelings or messages to your loved ones, letter writing is a grey dream but yet we have millions of books around the world that are actually compilations of letters written by great writers.
Letters are an important part of our culture and heritage and offer significance to who you are. I guess there are people around the globe who still write letters, people who care for and dare to preserve culture and heritage, people who value language. Down here, I do not know anyone who still writes letters. We are too tech savvy and we switch to modern trends and techniques ‘super easily’ without paying heed to what we might be sacrificing. This is a very irregular approach and it eventually results in the mere depletion of value systems. But who cares about value systems now! All we want is our name in the ‘universal rate race’. With applications that speak for you, you are in no need to sit down, grab a pen and some paper and write a letter. A smiley would do the job for you and you have several for every occasion.
What I am trying to imply here is that one, I miss writing letters and two, over this pretext, I find that the human world has sacrificed some very essential things while entertaining technology. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Well, it makes complete sense to me. I have been tamed by technology to an extent that I am totally dependent on it and so are all of you. If I miss writing letters, then the simplest thing to do is to start writing letters. Since the technology has displaced almost everything, I do not have people who would care to read my letters. So I am in a fix and I am no longer contributing to the cultural heritage of letters. If I want to write some letters, I have to post them to myself and I already discussed that that sounds and is practically silly. I am left with little. The best I can do is email letters to people but again they are used to crisp emoticons and they will, most probably, enlist me as spam. I would better not email letters since they would end in spam which is very bad. So, thanks to technology, I have almost lost the art of writing letters, beautiful letters.
