Once upon a time people sent pigeons, beat drums and made smoke signals to express themselves. Lovers gave each other shy nods in crowded places and dreamt of running into a childhood sweetheart only in heaven.
Fast-forward from the days when royal messengers travelled on horseback for months with gem-encrusted dinner invites from one king to another to what our generation remembers most - the yellow postcard with its scrawled content there for all to see and the inlands and the white envelopes with postage stamps licked just enough to sit tight on them.
Those were the days communication was cast in stone. You could not retrieve these missives once launched. If you put your 'yes' in the 'no' section, you just married the wrong guy with a ‘that’s that’ sigh.
Many a book and film has someone snooping around to recover a note they sent but now want to fish out of the post box before the postman gets there. If Betty wrote a letter but the letter was too bitter, she had to write a bit of better letter to make the bitter letter better. She couldn’t just ctrl-alt-delete.
And onward to the golden period of STD calls and trunk calls and fax and courier services. Then the world began to open up with a vengeance: you could find old or new friends on Facebook or Tinder or anywhere.
Till Gmail and WhatsApp recently made quick retractions possible, we had to wallow in an indefinite amount of words to get out of the words already said or sent. That the recipient can still see when we recall a sent text, that we typed and deleted, is galling enough. Auto-correct just laughs at us all the time. It turns 'all the best' into 'all the breast' and 'let's meet out' into 'let’s make out'.
In the post-pandemic pandemonium, we must learn yet another new lingo in our old age. We mime, wave hands, daub eye with extra kohl. Firm handshakes and warm hugs are a thing of the past. Weddings and funerals are zoom events - in real-time we'd take our boredom out on the buffet, now we have to look pleasant while muttering angrily on mute. Emojis have multiplied, smileys are rationed and gifs used judiciously. 'Lol', you type deadpan.
Amour has its own tech glitches. Our best lines are gobbled up by static or bad signal. Ghosting is the new-age villain. O, the total rebuff of the two blue ticks! The seen-zoned are corpses on a battlefield. If only mobile phones hadn’t been invented. Then we would never know how much someone is not thinking of us. A silent phone clicks like a gun.
(The writer can be reached at shinieantony@gmail.com)