Staff Reporter
BANGALORE: Letters have the potential to connect the past, the present and the future unlike electronic mail and SMS, writer Shashi Deshpande has said.
She was speaking after releasing a special postal cover on the occasion of Akshara Day organised as part of “Karnapex-2007” by the Postal Department here on Saturday. The three-day State-level philately exhibition was inaugurated on Friday.
“E-mails and short messages on cell phones can be deleted. But letters written on paper cannot be deleted (unless destroyed),” she said. “And the pleasure you derive from handwriting cannot be explained,” she said.
Ms. Deshpande said she had written all her manuscripts herself and she loved to preserve and read them. The manuscripts of her father and Kannada novelist Sriranga had been given to the Kannad University. He had a beautiful handwriting, she said. Exhorting the younger generation to develop the habit of writing by hand, Ms. Deshpande said that letters could well form a part of history. The future generation would gain rich experience from the past through handwritten works, she said.
The occasion also saw a number of schoolchildren participating in a handwriting competition.
Chief Postmaster General, Karnataka Circle, Meera Datta said the department’s experiments with e-post and e-stamping were in an advanced stage.