Best Wishes for 2010 to all my friends and your loved ones.
The absence of both the eves from my home turned this New Year’s Eve into quite a boring state of affair. These days I am the whole and sole moving creature in my home and moving so fast at work that it leaves with neither time nor the temperament to jot down a few lines for my blog. Initially I had decided that I would welcome the New Year in a deep state of meditation sitting in the serene posture of Buddha. That did not happen but instead I found myself reflecting on the changes I witnessed in my lifetime. Thoughts were drifting and swaying in all direction till I started to think about New Year greeting Vis-à-vis sending cards and letters.
The world of this small-town boy was finite and very small as I grew up. We had a few friends but fortunately they were real to the letter “l” (pun intended). We would meet at least once most of the days and we could touch, feel them, hug them and even fight with them unlike the virtual and at times artificial friends that we have these days! We never used cards to wish our friends for Christmas or the New Year. Occasionally we used to send one to the class teachers! Parents did use postcards to write to the relatives and most of the time privacy was not an issue and if it was, there was always an envelope.
The world started to grow bigger during the college days. Having moved far away from home I started to write letters regularly and that was the only affordable channel of regular communication. During festivals we had exchange of letters among cards with childhood, school mates and pen pals.
Life took another turn as we graduated from college and stepped into the more materialistic (real) world. Handwritten letters started to make room for printed cards that required only a signature before it could be sent to post. With the personalized message missing, it was the beginning of losing touch with dear old friends while making lots of new acquaintances at the workplaces and in the tinsel town.
Come mid nineties and our world changed again and this time it became extremely small while remaining massively BIG. We were ushered in to the world of the internet. All of a sudden old friends and old flames started to appear back in the horizon. Friends separated by thousands of miles became closer than ever, responding to each other over enthusiastically within moments to receiving an email. Tagged along came the chartrooms where friends were waiting eagerly for the most important event of the day... the Big Adda (chat) at the cyber coffee Shop.
By this time “the obituary” was already written for the era of “hand written” letter and “Seasons Greeting card” was fast becoming part of the history. At the same time we were getting used to receiving emails informing an E-card waits for me should I decide to follow the given link. They were coming in huge numbers around the year celebrating every occasion and commemorating the “Friendship day” many times a year.
We turned another corner by the time we stepped in the latter half of last decade. The emails and the e-cards started to disappear as fast as they came in. While friends decided to abstain from writing meaningful emails, our fellow human beings from Nigeria took that task to ensure that there was no dearth of spam mails in our inbox. On one side the E-card sites have started to charge money trying to reap what they had sown while on the other hand it was the advent of the social networking sites that provided new platform to celebrate festivities with family and friends. Writing a simple statement of what was in my mind was sufficient to wish all of the friends. The ultimate level of achievement in efficiency and energy conservation!
The phone calls, SMS and emails have taken away the waiting for the joy of waiting for the mailman/ postman. If they come they get only the bills and sometimes periodicals. But I have one “hand written letter” that arrives by post once in awhile. That is because there is this only one person with whom I still have written communication and we both cherish it. A little while back I received a letter which has arrived here via Dubai and now it is my turn to reply!
A pile of post that came in today
Only one handwritten letter
