Blast from the past

I miss letters... Sending and receiving... Want to receive some mail... By post...!” tweeted Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra, who at 30, is probably the last generation to lament the loss of letter writing. Gen Y today is into iPads, twitter, face time chats and voice messages to communicate with their loved ones. This tech-savvy generation will never know the thrill of using that Parker fountain pen to write a long letter on scented paper, gently folding it and placing it in a yellow envelope that would carefully be dropped off in a mail box.

Nah! This is a privileged lot which believes in instant gratification. “Back in the bay with network... just realised how reliant we’ve become on the Internet to stay connected... technology’s a boon and a bane,” tweets Arjun Kapoor. This Bollywood star along with others of his ilk will never know the longing of waiting weeks for the postman to knock with a letter from a loved one.

Fifteen-year-old Neel Virwani, who studies at Stonehill International School in Bengaluru, is quite fascinated by the idea of letter writing, “I was asked to write a letter to my friend when I was in 4th grade and I thought it was quite cool,” he confesses but like most teens admits he would get worried if he didn’t get an instant reply to his WhatsApp message. Ask Neel if he has heard of single screen theatres, and he responds in the affirmative but can’t quite relate to the concept. Ask him if he has heard of ’70s most popular government-run TV channel, Doordarshan, and he asks, “What’s that?” A popular refrain from teens his age, who like Neel find it incredulous that “people used large cameras to take photographs”.

Nor will youngsters today understand the anxiety pangs on receiving an urgent telegram: The harbinger of new both good and bad that could change our lives in a jiffy. Eighteen-year-old Aratika Moitra, who studies at Auxilium Convent in Kolkata, is intrigued by the concept of a telegram. “There’s a sense of adventure in it. Small bits of paper bearing scattered words, resembling cryptic messages of sorts, open to deciphering. Also, it must have been unnerving because the receiver could not ask questions, there was no room for clarifications,” she wonders.

Like her, India’s millennium babies will never have to linger by their phone (a heavy black instrument) for the operator to connect them to a relative living in another city or country. “I have heard of trunk calls from my grandmother, they were used to make long-distance phone calls. One had to call the operator who would connect both parties,” adds Aratika.

Thirteen-year-old Ameya Shah from Mumbai’s Thakur Public School cannot imagine life without his cellphone. “I have a mobile phone and so do my friends and we use WhatsApp to keep in touch. Had it not been for mobile phones, I don’t think we’d have kept in touch as much as we do because then only calling each other and writing letters would be an alternative,” he says, adding, “I think children who grew up in the ’90s or the ’80s and those who grew up after that are both lucky in their own way. The former had a lot more exposure to outdoor games than my generation does because they weren’t as attracted to computer and video games. My generation has that advantage and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

Nineteen-year-old Ageesha Anilkumar from Thiruva-nanthapuram has never written a letter. That’s why she was surprised to receive a letter from a friend years back. She even showed it to her parents. And that’s when she heard about this concept. “I found it unbelievable that it was the only way they could contact one another,” she says, But Ageesha has had glimpses into an old world that she missed, when her father who works with the BSNL would take the family to exhibitions of old telephones. “The structure of that old phone was so beautiful. Once when dad brought an old rotary dial phone home, I played with it, dialling on and on till my fingers hurt.”

In sharp contrast Thiruvananthapuram-based law graduate Swathy is a ’90s kid but she can relate to the smell of a library book and battery-operated video games, and remembers the monthly letters she wrote to her father who was away telling him how she missed him. She wonders how today’s generation will understand the satisfaction of slamming the receiver down after a fight over the phone because now it has come down to tapping the screen to end the call. But she is fascinated to hear her mother’s childhood stories. “My mother tells me about how there was no television and only radios, tape recorders and cinema halls in the city for any kind of entertainment. She fondly remembers the radio which she held close to her all the time playing Hindi songs all day long,” Swathy says.

She goes further back to her late grandfather’s generation, remembering a bundle of cassettes and recordings she found in one of his boxes. “Out of curiosity I played one of those recordings and it was such a shock to discover my grandfather’s voice singing one of his favourite old melodies,” says Swathy.Swathy sums it up rather succinctly when she quips, “Time changes our life so much, it is like holding on to sand, it slips right through your fingers. There are so many treasures of the past which are forgotten even though it was an important part of our lives at that moment once upon a time.”

Yes, we are living in modern times now where you can even hire a private air charter service to Alaska; in short, technology has bridged the gap between time and distance. And it is indeed a blessing!