Times they are e-changin'

Outside our door, and most doors in our quiet colony, there's a small red letter box. Less than a decade ago I'd check it every afternoon. If it was empty, I'd look again in the evening just in case the postman had been delayed. There were so many people I wanted to hear from - old parents, faraway friends, a husband on 'field' posting facing armed 'encounters' on an almost daily basis, editors who held the fate of my manuscripts in the balance ....

Technology had come to the rest of the country but like many of my ilk, I held out stubbornly. Nothing could replace the feel of a crackly page as I pulled it out of a scented, or sometimes grimy, envelope. Nothing was more personal and more revealing than the slight quiver in the handwriting ("Sorry, the doorbell rang and I got a start!"), the many add-ons that had me turning the page this way and that so as not to miss a word or phrase, the notes slipped into the annual greeting card to keep each other updated on family developments....

Rereading old letters, reliving long forgotten sentiments, looking at the journey in well-rounded letters can tear at the heart and yet leave it replete with the bonds of affection. For all those over a 'certain' age, there could be no substitute for pen on paper and the printed page.

The written word online and the infinite information available at a click of the mouse can never be as pleasing as actually turning the pages of an encyclopedia or a dictionary. But eventually even the most stubborn of us have had to acknowledge that a communication revolution of such proportions is here to stay and we'd best get down to embracing it.

But how does one get used to being bombarded by circulating messages from friends and relatives who choose to announce their continued existence by a hasty click of the 'Forward' button? When someone does write, it is something akin to gobbledegook for which the uninitiated like me need a Rosetta stone to decipher the message which is a blend of SMSish and emailese that employs no punctuation, and forgets all spelling rules.

Some e-mailers cause even more confusion by employing a Haiku-esque pattern of words that need to be read three times with imaginary commas and periods placed in appropriate places to understand what it's all about. But what a world has opened out for all of us! Long forgotten relatives who migrated to far away dots on the globe are suddenly in touch again and within a few hours of the first mail, forty years of separation are bridged swiftly and neatly - a link, an album of photographs, a blog - you feel like you've always known that little girl or boy who left when you were a little one too! What's more, you don't have to struggle to recall what you wrote: the whole exchange has taken only a few minutes, and if that is long enough for you to forget what you wrote, well, it's right there on the screen along with the reply! Sheer magic! Why worry about the liberties taken with language when you're compensated by closer ties than ever before?

So if it takes a red letter day to fill the red letter box, so be it. Maybe at last, it's time to move with the times.

- Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India