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Roundabout: Reclaiming the lost art of letter writing
Letter writing is a now a long-lost art but a recent experiment in pandemic time by a city writer-academic to get school-going children to pen letters to famous persons is a way of reclaiming the forgotten art, yielding a book in the bargain
For someone who grew up writing letters, from just about the time I learned to form short sentences in the early 60s, it is difficult to recall to whom I wrote the last letter and when. Perhaps, it was sometime in the late 90s as by the start of the new millennium even season’s greeting cards had become a thing of the past and one had started picking up cards with standardised messages and emailing them. Soon, one began simply sending a single message to all friends on Facebook with a pretty picture in tow. And for some years now it has just been festive messages on WhatsApp. But many have wondered, in prose and sometimes in poetry, about what became of all those letters that one wrote on stormy nights and sent to many a destination.
Letters: Then and now
We are quick to adapt and accept change as inevitable, thus not much thought has been given to what Gen Z has missed by forgoing this form of communication that had been nurtured for thousands of years in different cultures and chiseled to perfection. A few years back when my four-year-old granddaughter came back from a school excursion brimming with questions as she had visited a post office, I realised how she knew nothing of what to our generation had been a way of life. There was a tug at the heart when she asked all kinds of questions. “Tell me Naani, what is a post office?” she asked. Trying to explain it all to this child of a different world a hundred memories stirred in my mind and I was reminded of a Punjabi folk song by the legendary Surinder Kaur ‘Tainu deangi panj patase veh munshi khat likh de’. The song has an unlettered village girl pleading with the clerk to write a letter to her husband who is far away and the price she offers for this task is five sugar crystals!
Now, before I go off on a tangent let me come to the point. I have this refreshing book in hand, in which present-day children have written letters of all kinds to the famous and the infamous. Forgive me, I will romance the letter another time though it is long overdue. The book is called ‘Unlocking Minds: Covid-19’ and its pleasing pastel cover has a notepad and a pen as and a letter beginning with ‘Dear Bhagat Singh’ and the Greek poet Sappho besides envelopes addressed to Adolf Hitler, Rosa Parks and Neil Armstrong! This amazing collection of letters, penned by young minds, is the brainchild of Chandigarh-based writer-academic Kanwalpreet Singh. Many would remember Kanwalpreet for penning sensitively the autobiography of much-loved pioneering woman activist of Punjab, Oshima Raikhy.
Admiration and angst
Talking about ‘Unlocking Minds’, Kanwal says: “This book is a first of its kind where Millennials have written letters to famous personalities in the form of a heart-to-heart talk, sometimes in admiration and at other times in angst.When I floated this idea of letter writing amid the pandemic, my young friends said they loved the concept. Soon we got down to work by framing a proposal and circulating it. A lot of positive response came from the young ones, when we gave the call in April 2020.”
Children and adolescents were given enough time to read, research and then put down their thoughts on paper and their hard work shows in the way they have been able to deal analytically with the lives and impact of dictators, politicians, artists, poets, sports persons and many others.
The list of personalities chosen is interesting and varied. It includes Benito Mussolini, Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Ruskin Bond, MF Husain, Charlie Chaplin, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Karl Marx and many more.
Students of all age groups participated in the epistolary exercise from Class-3 student Dhiren Aggarwal to Class-12 student Ameek Kaur, who penned a poignant letter to the Hathras rape victim.
The book also incudes some essays on lockdown experiences and interviews by students with frontline warriors ranging from doctors to safai karamcharis. A fine effort by one and all.
The letters, of course, are the mainstay of the book and before signing off I go back to the internet to browse through hundreds of nostalgic and heartwarming quotes encapsulating the spirit of the lost art of letter writing and would like to leave you with a quote by Alena Hall: “There’s something sacred and romantic, in the broadest sense about communicating in the way generations before us once did. It’s how grandma and grandpa kept their love alive during wartime.”
