Postmanworry.com

In this worry-driven world of ours, add another niggling anxiety to wrinkle our foreheads over. Those short and snappy e-mails swirling ar...

In this worry-driven world of ours, add another niggling anxiety to wrinkle our foreheads over. Those short and snappy e-mails swirling around cyberspace are, it is feared, nibbling away at the foundations of the world as we know it. Reasons listed are endless. The carefully cultivated art of letter-writing is under a technological onslaught. The human effort to recollect emotion in tranquility is giving way to instantly messaged, impulsively despatched oneliners. And the friendly folk at the neighbourhood post office are staring at an unemployed future as Netizens bypass the red-and-black box for tiny cyber cafes to access their share of the billions of e-mails send every day. Talk about bad omens.

But then, nothing is ever as dreary as it first appears to be. Take the postal department. Their statistics reveal that over the last couple of years the number of first-class mails has fallen by more than 40 per cent. In Delhi the corresponding figure stands at 15 per cent, and in Bangalore it is pegged at a more comforting 4 per cent. But is the dotcom revolution really responsible? Not entirely. For, if a comprehensive survey were to be undertaken, it would be found that the number of parcels and envelopes being delivered is in fact increasing, but much of the business is being captured by courier companies. In a country with galloping population increases and rising, however slowly, literacy levels on the one hand, and a relatively low Net penetration on the other, snail mail is bound to flourish.

E-changes cannot be an excuse for inefficiencies 8212; and the decline that informs the postal services has been experienced by all Indians, sometimes in the most innocuous of ways, but often at great personal inconvenience. It is a failing the postal department would do well to address. That is, if it wants to recover the business surrendered to couriers. And if it wants to exploit the opportunities that will be offered by e-commerce. Bleary-eyed Netizens may prefer e-mail over snail mail, but they are also likely to order books, groceries and much besides over the Net instead of legging it to the corner-store or the mall. And guess who delivers the goods, literally?Indeed, even laments about the death of the old-fashioned letter seem slightly misplaced. Yes, most e-mails are short, mundane and splattered with grammatical errors. But then, so are most letters. In any case, given the ease and flexibility offered by e-mail, most users would attest to the creatively worded, innovatively argued missives they receive every so often.

Missives that may have remained unpenned in earlier times, given the hassles of finding paper, pen, envelope and the additional tedium of actually posting it. Yet, it is also evident that e-mails are nourishing ever shortening attention spans and sustaining sociopsychological strains resulting from the speed the e-revolution demands. Yet, these are the very same worries voiced decades ago when telephones became household gadgets, when air travel shortened distances.