TIRUVANANTHAPURAM : Sivaranjani fondly recalls how she struck up friendship with Rachel, a 14- year-old Californian, through letters. She still vividly remembers Rachel’s first letter which was accompanied by a picture of her birthday party. Later, Sivaranjani sent her a map of India, carefully marking Chennai, her hometown, on it. The letters would take a good two and a half weeks to reach each other but the correspondence grew into friendship, and a sharing and experiencing each other’s culture through letters.
While Sivaranjani grew up writing letters to a penpal, Nanditha Sankar never had one. In the books she grew up reading, there would always be the mention of a penpal and she would always yearn to have one. And then years later, last February, on her birthday, Nanditha wrote a letter to a stranger in Munich. ‘’That was the most uninhibited letter I ever wrote,’’ Nanditha says. Excited, Nanditha shared her joy with her friend Sivaranjani.
And Quillpal was born the very next day.
Quillpal is for people who always cherished the idea of having a penpal while growing up; a platform that connects letter writers based on their personal interests and preferences. It is for the ones who get a high just by running one’s hands over the flap of the envelope, for those who find a thrill in putting a letter in a postbox. And for people who treasure the letters they receive and get a pleasure from re-reading them. It is for people like Aby Johnson who would send self-addressed letters, just to enjoy the childish excitement of opening an envelope and reading the letter inside.
“I couldn’t stop when I started writing. Words just poured out,” recalls Aby who got connected to a person in Gujarat via Quillpal. For someone like Aby who would write letters to a person in the neighbourhood just to experience the joy of writing, the new pal in Gujarat has added a fresh dimension to his life. “I was enthralled when I received the first letter. I am getting to know the person just through his words,” says Aby who cannot contain his excitement. He confesses he has been pestering the postman every time as he eagerly awaits for his penpal’s letter.
Quillpal has now matched more than 300 people across 10 countries. At present, along with English, several regional languages have been included. Apart from India, Quillpal has letter-writers from US, Sri Lanka, Germany, Canada, China, Turkey and Netherlands.The Instagram page of Quillpall is flooded with images the writers have captured of their letters. The response has been immense, the duo say. “The aim is to take writing to everybody,” says Sivaranjani, an education consultant in Delhi.
“A lot of us would have loved to have a pen pal as a child. When I was small, although I yearned for a penpal, I had no idea how to go about it and was scared too. So I kept it to myself and that is one of the reasons to start this platform that allows people to connect with a penpal,” says Nanditha who belongs to the city and currently works as a management consultant in a business school in Chennai.
Quillpal works with a Google Form, where one shares basic details, interests, the frequency of writing, the language one prefers and so forth. “We then try to match and make a pair based on your details. And we decide arbitrarily on who will be the first person to send the letter. We then share the address and we give about a week’s deadline to ensure that the letter is posted,” says Sivaranjani. Writing letters and having a penpal is more of an emotion, a feeling beyond words, the letter writers will tell you. “Having a penpal and knowing that there is somebody out there who is waiting to hear back from you makes a lot of a difference.
For me, now there is a heightened sense of activity and attention to all the activities I am engaged in as I will be sharing it with my penpal. I think when you write a letter, it also helps you to reflect inwards. As much as you try to understand the other person, you are looking back at yourself. In the long run, we would love to reach out to children and get them to write,” says Nanditha.
“The very act of receiving a letter, opening the envelope and reading it is thrilling. There have been times when I would reread the same letter over and over,” says Sivaranjani. In the era of WhatsApp and other social media, people should take a step back and get back to writing, she adds.