LETTER WRITING - 'A Diminishing Art'

When was the last time you sat down to write a letter? Not a text message, not an e-mail that you stabbed out with your two thumbs, not a greeting card designed with your creative hands that you signed your name to, but an honest heart-to-heart letter that you wrote on paper with a pen, crafted with love, sealed it with a kiss and posted it? If you are like most people you probably handle most of your correspondence electronically, and don’t think twice before deleting text messages and e-mails. Yet there are chances where you’ve got a box of letters buried in your locker or file, stashed away somewhere that fill your heart with joy and happiness every time you dig them out and reread them. In this era of instantaneous communication, a hand-written letter is rare and wondrous item. Letter writing is among our most ancient of arts. A good hand-written letter is a creative act and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability because a hand-written letter opens a window on the soul in a way that any other form of communication can never do. You await their arrival and later take special care to treasure them in a box for safe keeping. Think of the letters and the mind falls on Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Jawaharlal Nehru and CS Lewis. We have always liked to pore over the letters of great people like Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi for the insight this offers into their lives: the writing, the crossings-out, and the very feel of history on a paper.

Letter writing has seen an unprecedented decline in recent years. Off course e-mail writing is a wonderful invention. It links people across the world, destroying in an instant the hurdle of time and geography that confronts slow mail. But it is by its nature is transitory lacks the spark of character and feelings that only hand-written letter can provide. On the other hand texts and e-mails are not just replacing letter writing as a form of communication. They are also changing the language we use to communicate. Here is an example. Sometimes as students turn in papers and assignments that are written in the same kind of shorthand they use for text messages. Especially using the word ‘u’ instead of ‘you' which seems jarring. This is also a problem in businesses where an employee writes an e-mail to a customer and has to be checked for slang but with a letter you never seem to have those conversations. And though it is encouraging that students are doing a lot more writing in their leisure time than they ever did before the time of text messages and e-mails, but generally there is a degree of informality and an unedited quality to e-mails due to which their writing ability is never increased.  A letter is just more simple and formal. Sitting here savoring the next letter from my mom, the real joy I take from looking at a hand-written letter is not just the content but the way in which it is written. If you are conveying some information typed out in an e-mail, it doesn’t really have the same immediate emotional impact as when you see someone's hand writing expressing those same thoughts. Letters are far more than communication. It’s actually the touch of the paper, the feeling you get when you open it. I have a collection of letters kept in my file and every days I come across it. It’s amazing how you can relieve those moments with a letter. With an e-mail, it doesn’t have the same feelings. Letters are just very personal, so hopefully it’s not a dying art. However children nowadays are not privileged to read a hand-written letter and feel the joy and the magic which the letter does express.

With this fading generation, I find myself quietly asking, also be the last to write letters?
Messages crafted and chiseled by hand rather than bits of binary code?
Writing that carries emotions rather than emoticons?