PC was once an acronym for postcard or police constable. In the digital age or from the mid-20th century, it came to stand for personal computer. Search engines yield at least 300 other expansions. The postcard, along with picture postcard, was an indispensable communication channel, as elders fondly recall. Among friends and relatives the PC served as the byword for connectivity in the era before cellphones.
The picture postcard remains alive, long after the pasteboard original is superseded. When an old friend sends me a hand-written postcard rather than an impersonal email, I congratulate his loyalty to our shared past and even walk to the post office to send my reply, paying 50p, or buying stamps if coins aren’t available. When a close relative goes to Paris or London, I do expect the picture postcard, with one side showing the Eiffel Tower or Trafalgar Square. Images of sculpture and paintings are all right, but I miss the familiar foreign picture card with the standard scrawl, “Wish you too were here”.
The old PC rouses memories of Thathu, my mother’s father, a true Victorian who mentored me in my college years in the early ’50s. He was a self-made man from a temple town. He studied hard, gained scholarships, graduated from Madras Christian College more than a century ago, became a judge, grew deaf and retired early, studied Valmiki Ramayana with a pundit and played billiards in the club. The British Raj could be proud of his admiration for the Indian postal service. He liked to send me postcards with his terse counsel on studying ancient Greek history or Shakespeare, Dickens and Macaulay.
It was understood that letters should be acknowledged and responded to. This habit, though tiresome, helped me in my career. In the bureaucracy of institutions, some colleagues resented my unwelcome demands, for the old-world courtesies of correspondence.
In Howards End, E M Forster made the famous plea, “Only connect”. He urged the ethos of closer connections among people of different backgrounds to improve society. T S Eliot wrote a long poem of worldly dismay, The Waste Land, lamenting: “On Margate Sands/I connect/Nothing with nothing.”
I grew up without access to a phone at home. The snail mail was paramount, supplemented by leg-work and the bicycle, which required an annual licence on a tin triangle. In the era of cellphones and iPads, I became a back-number of 10 digits. But the PC as personal computer is not as connective as I hoped. My unread and unsent emails multiply by the minute, with sudden interruptions for want of Internet connectivity. This is the current equivalent of the old excuse of blaming wayward postmen and offices where customers abhor queues.
My routine begins expectantly at the inbox, but the PC snubs me with “No Internet link”. My counter-move of phoning the service and retiring hurt in mind, spirit and nerves are familiar: Ring 1 for English, 2 for Hindi, 3 for Kannada; any number for “OK, I give up”. I am resigned to belong to the new Era of Disconnections.