Hand-written letters — art, craft, habit, history, creativity, whatever it is or was — come with statuory warning today; it is bound to smack of nostalgia and irredeemable romanticism. And its perpetrators — terribly dated perplexing beings. Prefixed with a frivolous ‘snail’ once competitive counterparts came into the fray, letters have withdrawn without much of a whimper. Pale blue and pink sheets, folded in impossible ways and holding within words and emotions packed so tight that they struggle to breathe and delivered by breathless postmen are almost relics.
The bells tolled for the old-fashioned mails as the young naturally lived through e-mails, iPads and cell phones. Committed letter writers gingerly went online to keep pace. The post-offices overwhelmed by the fear of being redundant are revamping and re-discovering themselves.
Yet, when mails are a forgotten part of our lives, The Rumpus, a U.S. based online magazine tried something quirky recently to astonishing response. About six months ago, their website announced the launch of “Letters in the Mail”, through which a clutch of authors wrote letters to the subscribers. The letters, about three to four a month with each author writing one, landed in the subscriber’s mail box sending many into raptures. On their website are ecstatic responses from those who touched, felt and experienced those letters and those who wanted them spread out to India and Dubai.
A part of life
However, with no such fillips here, letters are leaving our imagination, so too the act of writing them. The practitioners mourn its death with regret. Veteran author M.T. Vasudevan Nair, among the few who still communicates through letters, says, “Letter writing is an art and craft. I still write.” His letters are matter-of-fact, he says. S.K. Pottekkat, Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer, G. Sankara Kurup were beautiful letter writers, he adds. “Pottekkat’s letters were beautiful and elaborate. Basheer used to think a lot about the letter he wrote and even his letters were humorous.”
Growing up when even printed books were rare, M.T. says, letters and letter-writing were all they had. “In the beginning, even the novels were in letter-form,” he reminds. He remembers vividly the exalted figure of his childhood – the postman. “The postman was an institution. He was not merely a man who gave you letters. If he saw you were anxious, he would assure you, tell you ‘It will come. Wait a day or two.’”
M.T. says, “Letters were part of literature. I fear it will cease. It is happening the world over. In France, there are many who are sorry about letters no more being part of their lives. I depend on letters. I don’t gel well with machines, I can’t drive a car, I don’t use the applications in a cell phone,” says the author who writes his novels and short stories in long hand.
And then there are those who have made the transition smoothly. Radha Nair, a retired college teacher in her 60s, once a compulsive letter writer, who wrote to her family and students with equal zest, is now at home with SMS and e-mails. “Now our family has a group e-mail, otherwise it is mostly SMS and phone,” says Radha.
Though she knows letters express our deepest thoughts the best, the move towards online has been so gradual and smooth that she doesn’t remember when letter-writing ceased to be. “I am sorry to say I don’t write letters anymore. Till about five years back, I used to write to my daughters. Now even writing to my grand daughter is on e-mail,” she says. A habit since childhood, letters defined her adult life too. “My father insisted on letters. It kept the family together.”
Letters now for her now are mostly ‘Thank you’ notes, congratulatory messages or obligatory ones. “I used to keep the letters that came to me. Of late, I have disposed off quite a few. Getting rid of the old is part of life, isn’t it?”
With letter-writing losing its followers, the post office too is looking for new ways to remain relevant. “Person-to-person mails have steadily declined over the years,” says Hemant Kumar Sharma, Post Master General, Kozhikode. Post cards are now largely used for advertisements, he says, while the thrust areas for the department are services like speed post, express parcels and facilities such as ATMs in the post office.
An art
A homage to the art of letter-writing are couple of competitions the department conducts mostly during the postal week. “There are letter-writing competitions like the one conducted by the Universal Postal Union and another by SAARC. The response to these competitions is healthy,” says Sharma.
Those like M.T. know it is hard to bring back letter-writing. But what is left of it are bits of nostalgia.
For Linoy P. Joy, a 22-year-old engineering graduate, letter-writing was part of his hostel days and the habit has been promptly done away with. “I often think of writing a letter, sometimes just for the heck of it,” he says. “We did not have permission to use phones in the boarding school. So we wrote letters to family, friends and relatives. It was a relief to write letters and often a lot of thought went into it,” remembers Linoy.
Dancer Aswathy Srikanth says, “When I heard about the death of author Kamala Das, I remembered she had written a letter to me for my wedding. I frantically searched for it and just wanted to read and feel it. Though I remember keeping it safe, I couldn’t find it.”
