Frankly, I cannot remember the last time I received a hand written letter. Letter writing is something which has been lost in the current trend of e mails, phone calls, sms’s, What’s App and Bbm’s and I wonder if the generations after us will even know what letter writing was. Will letters soon be part of museums and will our children laugh at what a slow method of communication we once used?
Letter’s have their own charm, the feel of the paper, the smell of the ink, the stamp on the envelope and the joy of imagining the miles the letter travelled to reach us. I remember as a child how I would love to write letters to my cousins who lived out of Delhi, some of them in boarding schools. It was wonderful, that anticipation of receiving a letter, tearing it open and reading its contents. Same for when I’d slide a letter in its envelope, paste a stamp on it, glue it and slip it into the post box; imagining how many days it would take before it reached its destination.
I remember when I was in high school I made my first pen pal, a Kashmiri boy, who’d write to me in detail about the beautiful state he called home and I’d write to him with equal enthusiasm (as hard as it was) about Delhi. Memories like these make me smile and long for simpler times gone by.
