One night last week my husband and I were listening to the news on television. He was alternating between two Indian news channels.Well, I was actually reading ( could I be doing anything else?! Sometimes I feel I fit the rest of my busy life around reading...) but I had an ear out for the news from India. He soon got aggravated with the two popular news anchors from rival leading channels who were shouting themselves hoarse and began flicking through a few other Indian channels.
Suddenly I heard one of my favourite songs from a Bollywood movie. He had moved on but I asked him to go back to that channel as I really wanted to listen to that particular song. He obliged and the song was from a block buster movie called 'Border'. The movie was released seventeen years ago and is based on the life of the soldiers and officers stationed at the Indian border and the subsequent outbreak of war with our neighbouring country.
The lyrics said, ''Sandese aate hai, hume tadpate hai,
Ki chitti aati hai, pooche jaati hai,
Ki ghar kab aaoge? Likho kab aao ge!
They mean that the soldiers are saying 'We get messages from home that torture us.The letter comes and it asks, When will you come home? Write when will you be back!'
The reason why this song always strikes a chord with me is that I spent most of my childhood waiting for letters too! Given that my Dad was in the Indian Army, we were away from our grandparents and all of our close and extended family most of the time. In those pre Internet, no email, only snail mail days, we relied heavily on letters for news on what was happening back home. Also my Dad used to often be away for months at a time on Army exercises, or for training or for courses. Letters used to be our lifeline and many a time our only link to him.
For remember I am talking about days when even long distance phone call booths were unknown in India. If you wanted to call, you had to pre book it and then after hours you might get through if you were lucky enough! Another issue was that our phone, no matter in which city we were stationed, was routed through the Army telephone exchange. So even if our family tried to call us from our home town, they would end up speaking to army operators most of the time and spend a fortune in the process! So letters were the key to communication.
In these days of instant communication, it is hard to imagine that we had to wait at least a month to hear about any major event that might have happened back home. These days we often communicate with our parents and siblings in real time, which means we are updating them about what is going on even as the event is unfolding, be it a child's concert performance or cutting a birthday cake while doing live face time. Not so with us!
A few letters stand out in my mind. One was the one we received the minute we got home from school one day. My mother taught at the same school that my sister and I attended and we came back together in the Army Bus every day. My mother opened the letter which was from her mother and we got the news that her very young first cousin who had been suffering from kidney failure had passed away after a failed transplant operation. This had happened more than three weeks earlier but we were getting the news only then. The pure, sheer, unadulterated, unfettered grief that that letter brought to my mother stands out starkly in my mind even today, twenty six years after the tragedy.
Another letter was the one that told of my mother's maternal grandmother's death. She had been the erstwhile Rani Of Aundh before India became independent, but death lays its icy hands on kings and queens too, and we got the sad news through an inland letter that cost may be less than fifty paise in those days. That letter left its mark on my mind because it underlined the fact to me at a very young age, that we all have to go empty handed from this Earth, no matter who we may have been at the prime of our lives...and we are finally reduced to a few lines on a piece of paper. Today, of course, we would be reduced to a Facebook status update...
One thing that my mother had always emphasized was that we never, ever, open a letter that has been addressed to someone else. It is a nasty, sneaky thing to do! So when, one day, a letter came along for my Dad written by his first cousin and my mother immediately began opening it, I was really surprised. She explained that the very fact that he had written, meant something was wrong at home! And sure enough. the letter explained how my paternal grand mother had slipped down a few steps and had fractured her arm. So my Dad's cousin had whisked her away to his house as there was no way she could manage alone at home. Of course, by the time we got this letter, my grandmother's arm had already healed and she was probably back in her own house too!
Birthday cards were another, very attractive and colourful form of letters, since most people managed to put in lots of news on the blank side as well! With no Face Book and Linked In to remind us of birthdays of near and dear ones, we depended solely on our memories and took into account the number of days it took for cards to reach, thus buying them and posting them well in advance. A lot of thought went into choosing those cards and come January our house used to be flooded with them since we had three prominent occasions in a row in that month! And add new year's cards to those! We certainly kept the Indian Postal System buzzing! Cards are surely an extinct species now unless you count E-Cards.
As we moved around the country, we bid good bye to school friends every three years. We used to fervently promise each other to write frequently and most of us kept those promises and letters flew back and forth across the country right till the time email began becoming popular. I recently destroyed a few kilo grams of letters that had accumulated through almost three decades of writing. And no, it was not as easy as pressing the delete button. A few tears were definitely shed.
More than a decade ago, when my daughter was in kindergarten in Pune, I was waiting to pick her up and I saw the little girls sitting in a circle on the ground. They were playing the popular game 'I sent a letter to my father, on the way I lost it. Someone came and picked it up and put it in his pocket.' We had played the same game in school as had lakhs of school girls in my daughter's very old and elite school under those very trees, some of them a hundred plus years old. I did not know it then, but I was actually watching a generation for whom saying 'I sent a letter' would be just a game. Writing a letter in your English Language Exam does not count and even that will change to 'write an email to' soon!They were never to know the art of letter writing and the pleasure that comes from it, for the Internet boom was about to begin. I am so glad I got to enjoy both worlds.
Do they even sell these any more?! My son has never even seen one. And to think there was a time when we used to devour their content...
Suddenly I heard one of my favourite songs from a Bollywood movie. He had moved on but I asked him to go back to that channel as I really wanted to listen to that particular song. He obliged and the song was from a block buster movie called 'Border'. The movie was released seventeen years ago and is based on the life of the soldiers and officers stationed at the Indian border and the subsequent outbreak of war with our neighbouring country.
The lyrics said, ''Sandese aate hai, hume tadpate hai,
Ki chitti aati hai, pooche jaati hai,
Ki ghar kab aaoge? Likho kab aao ge!
They mean that the soldiers are saying 'We get messages from home that torture us.The letter comes and it asks, When will you come home? Write when will you be back!'
The reason why this song always strikes a chord with me is that I spent most of my childhood waiting for letters too! Given that my Dad was in the Indian Army, we were away from our grandparents and all of our close and extended family most of the time. In those pre Internet, no email, only snail mail days, we relied heavily on letters for news on what was happening back home. Also my Dad used to often be away for months at a time on Army exercises, or for training or for courses. Letters used to be our lifeline and many a time our only link to him.
For remember I am talking about days when even long distance phone call booths were unknown in India. If you wanted to call, you had to pre book it and then after hours you might get through if you were lucky enough! Another issue was that our phone, no matter in which city we were stationed, was routed through the Army telephone exchange. So even if our family tried to call us from our home town, they would end up speaking to army operators most of the time and spend a fortune in the process! So letters were the key to communication.
In these days of instant communication, it is hard to imagine that we had to wait at least a month to hear about any major event that might have happened back home. These days we often communicate with our parents and siblings in real time, which means we are updating them about what is going on even as the event is unfolding, be it a child's concert performance or cutting a birthday cake while doing live face time. Not so with us!
A few letters stand out in my mind. One was the one we received the minute we got home from school one day. My mother taught at the same school that my sister and I attended and we came back together in the Army Bus every day. My mother opened the letter which was from her mother and we got the news that her very young first cousin who had been suffering from kidney failure had passed away after a failed transplant operation. This had happened more than three weeks earlier but we were getting the news only then. The pure, sheer, unadulterated, unfettered grief that that letter brought to my mother stands out starkly in my mind even today, twenty six years after the tragedy.
Another letter was the one that told of my mother's maternal grandmother's death. She had been the erstwhile Rani Of Aundh before India became independent, but death lays its icy hands on kings and queens too, and we got the sad news through an inland letter that cost may be less than fifty paise in those days. That letter left its mark on my mind because it underlined the fact to me at a very young age, that we all have to go empty handed from this Earth, no matter who we may have been at the prime of our lives...and we are finally reduced to a few lines on a piece of paper. Today, of course, we would be reduced to a Facebook status update...
One thing that my mother had always emphasized was that we never, ever, open a letter that has been addressed to someone else. It is a nasty, sneaky thing to do! So when, one day, a letter came along for my Dad written by his first cousin and my mother immediately began opening it, I was really surprised. She explained that the very fact that he had written, meant something was wrong at home! And sure enough. the letter explained how my paternal grand mother had slipped down a few steps and had fractured her arm. So my Dad's cousin had whisked her away to his house as there was no way she could manage alone at home. Of course, by the time we got this letter, my grandmother's arm had already healed and she was probably back in her own house too!
Birthday cards were another, very attractive and colourful form of letters, since most people managed to put in lots of news on the blank side as well! With no Face Book and Linked In to remind us of birthdays of near and dear ones, we depended solely on our memories and took into account the number of days it took for cards to reach, thus buying them and posting them well in advance. A lot of thought went into choosing those cards and come January our house used to be flooded with them since we had three prominent occasions in a row in that month! And add new year's cards to those! We certainly kept the Indian Postal System buzzing! Cards are surely an extinct species now unless you count E-Cards.
As we moved around the country, we bid good bye to school friends every three years. We used to fervently promise each other to write frequently and most of us kept those promises and letters flew back and forth across the country right till the time email began becoming popular. I recently destroyed a few kilo grams of letters that had accumulated through almost three decades of writing. And no, it was not as easy as pressing the delete button. A few tears were definitely shed.
More than a decade ago, when my daughter was in kindergarten in Pune, I was waiting to pick her up and I saw the little girls sitting in a circle on the ground. They were playing the popular game 'I sent a letter to my father, on the way I lost it. Someone came and picked it up and put it in his pocket.' We had played the same game in school as had lakhs of school girls in my daughter's very old and elite school under those very trees, some of them a hundred plus years old. I did not know it then, but I was actually watching a generation for whom saying 'I sent a letter' would be just a game. Writing a letter in your English Language Exam does not count and even that will change to 'write an email to' soon!They were never to know the art of letter writing and the pleasure that comes from it, for the Internet boom was about to begin. I am so glad I got to enjoy both worlds.
Do they even sell these any more?! My son has never even seen one. And to think there was a time when we used to devour their content...
Very beautifully worded Anupama.It took me down the memory lane where i used to write letters to my moms aunt. It was a beautiful exchange of updates and the concluding statement always used to be Take care,looking forward for a reply from you.
ReplyDeleteThank you Moushumi! Yes those days are long gone now but remembering still feels good!
DeleteWow. I also used to write cards and letters to my family. Also when dating Sandeep we communicated through mail and we still have some of those filed away. 👌🏻
ReplyDelete