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Let's write

More than one generation has grown up without ever having eagerly awaited the post. In this era of digital communication, social media is helping some youngsters in the city revive letter writing.

Manasa Prabhu, a former copy writer, was facing trouble putting pen to paper when, last October, she started a project on Instagram by posting the hashtag #sendmeyourpostaladdress.

“In the beginning, I didn’t get many, but after a few months, people started sending me their addresses,” says the 27-year-old. By now, she has sent out about 50 “of those yellow 50-paise post cards.”

She has written to people in the city as well as those Delhi, Mumbai and Pune, mostly perfect strangers. “Once, someone from Pakistan got in touch with me, and I sent her an aerogram, asking her to tell me about how things are there. I was so excited, but she never wrote back,” says the freelancer.

But most people who send Manasa their addresses only want to receive her postcards, she confides. “A few months since I started, I got my first letter back and it was great,” she adds.

This apart, she also corresponds regularly with some people in the city. One of them is Bachelor in Economics student Sidharth Santhosh, who first started writing when in Class 11.

“I’m a history enthusiast, and I believe in recording life events so that they never fade away. Letters, I think, keep memories alive, if not on paper, in the minds of those who have read the letters for as long as they live,” he says.

Two of his aunts, who share his love for history, wrote him a couple of letters to when he was younger to keep the up tradition. “My grandparents also would tell me of the time when they wrote letters regularly,” he adds.

He and Manasa agree that hand-writing something in itself has a certain charm, a personalised feel, that other forms of communication — many that offer the sender instant gratification — lack. “It could be a simple note, thanking you for a letter, but it makes all the difference when you write it by hand,” she holds.

A passion to give out hand-written transcripts is what drives architect and freelance photographer Yatish V T.

Weekends take him to flea markets or bookstores where he claims a corner and begins to write out what he calls letters to you behind prints of photographs he has taken. “I write about what I’m contemplating then, anything that comes to mind,” he says. “They are addressed in the second-person singular and carry no name, but it’s almost like I’m conversing with myself, and people relate to them.”

He has a target of penning 999 of these and has also started the Facebook hashtag #999letterstoyou.

“Earlier, I would give my photographs to friends who wrote letters regularly to use as postcards, and even drop them into the postbox,” he shares. “But they stopped reaching people.” The other two also rue the inefficiency of the postal system. Sidharth has pen pals from across the world: France, Portugal, Brazil, USA. “But postcards to or from them often take a long time to reach and are sometimes not delivered at all. So I also regularly write to someone in Chennai and Manasa in Bengaluru,” he offers.

Manasa has written to the same address four times only to find out the letters haven’t been delivered. “I have started taking pictures of the letters before I post them. So if one isn’t delivered in a few weeks, I write out the same text and post it again,” she says.
If not for the passion individuals behind them, could cultural movements really take off?