When was the last time you wrote a handwritten letter? Last week, as my elder sister’s wedding drew near, my mother insisted on cleaning cupboards, sorting huge pile of books and many such assorted things at home. As I cleaned up the mess, I noticed several handwritten letters lying in an old folder. They ranged from postcards sent by friends from their vacations, grandma’s birthday cards and letters, small notes scribbled hurriedly and stuck on the insides of a greeting card, chits passed during laborious history lectures in school. In this frail yellowing pile, neatly tucked in a shoebox, I found something rather amusing — a collection of letters from my “pen-friend”, exchanged more than 12 years ago. Having a pen-friend back then was a rage. Teenagers would go to the school library, hunt for a particular teen magazine where they would find profiles of people interested in being pen-friends — replete with their interests, hobbies, nationalities. If you were lucky, a photograph of the prospective friend would accompany the text profile. More like a prehistoric version of online social communities. A bunch of us would ponder over names and generate the first shortlist, countrywise, and then make a second list based on mutual interests, etc. Somehow Scandinavian and East European countries were always in demand and everybody wished to have pen-friends from those. Painstakingly noting the address in the class notebook, one came back home only to write a dozen copies of the same letter, introducing oneself and requesting to be added to their “pen-friend list”. It wasn’t always that you were lucky, at times one wouldn’t hear back at all, after which it was time to move on — to the next edition of the teen monthly. I wrote a dozen letters to potential pen-pals in Norway, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland, Russia and Turkey. Thank God, it was the post Cold War era, and we had more countries to write to! Somehow, we always harboured doubts regarding some of the addresses that seemed to be strange permutations and combinations of English letters. However, my anxious attempts at finding a pen-pal in faraway lands bore little fruit. A few months later, I found a pen-friend, a little over 100 miles away from my hometown, and, of all the exotic places, in the capital — Delhi!
