Chitti aayi hai, aayi hai chitti — sang Pankaj Udhas in the popular movie Naam, of the seventies. The letter vividly evokes emptiness among family members when one of them has gone abroad to make a living. Loss, joy, nostalgia, and more are conveyed through a letter. I felt overjoyed when my first appointment came from far off Bhilai. In anticipation, I would trek to the post-office every day awaiting the letter.
Peeping through the window, I could see postmen sitting in a circle around a pile of letters, each one flinging a letter or a packet towards the right person after a glance at the address. This memory welled in me when my cousin passed on a stack of post cards in his possession.
Worn by years, many smudged, brittle to the touch, these post cards told a story by opening a window to the times gone by. They chronicled no profound thoughts or recorded any historical event of the day. They conveyed births, marriages, sicknesses and vitally death too. The post card invariably was the medium and the messenger for communication when telephone was a luxury and mostly unheard of among middle class families.
With technology making rapid strides, post card along with its siblings — inland letter and envelop — is dead. For a test, ask any present day school-going child what a post card is. He is sure to come up with a blank stare.
Letter writing then had to follow certain unwritten codes, Right hand corner was for date and place or city of residence. Exercising due diligence in offering respect to the addressee is a must. Everyone depending on his or her standing in the family and society must be respectfully addressed. Before you go to the main topic, the health and welfare must be inquired into. After you have conveyed the message, you conclude, again with a show of regard before you put your signature.
Exception to this rule was when a tragic incident like death needed to be conveyed. The recipient would immediately sense the purport of the letter at first glance. I believe, in North India, the custom to convey death was to snip off a corner of the letter. A post card was, in fact, almost a public document. In many villages, it was an additional duty for the postman to read aloud the letter to mostly illiterate villagers before he was offered a glass of water or a hot cup of chai. In this age of internet, formality in letter writing is thrown out of the window. English language itself is seeing a sea change, many a spelling taking a hit to the consternation of the ghosts of Wren and Martin. New entrant to the wordy revolution is emoji where language itself is dispensed with. What future for the language Mr Shakespeare?
C S HAYAVADANA RAO Email: hayavadana.rao92@gmail.com
