Representative image of a letter.
Credit: Pixabay Photo
The date "Aug 27, 1973" brought a flash from another universe when I stumbled upon a letter my grandfather, M R Menon, had written to his daughter, Chandra — my mother.
Muthachan was a man who took the English language more seriously than the English themselves. Largely self-schooled, he was an obsessive reader and a collector of words. If he came across an unfamiliar one, he wouldn’t rest until he had written it down, hunted for its meaning, and deployed it in a sentence with surgical precision.
The letter itself is a masterpiece from the Remington era — typed painstakingly, one click-clack at a time. I love its imperfections: the slightly drunk-looking letters, the faint misalignment, the proud little smudges of whitener where he must have changed his mind after his tenth re-reading. All charm. All soul. Muthachan was his own grammar Nazi.
What he wrote was equally rich — warm, solicitous, detailed — miniature documentaries of everyday life.
Today, we struggle even to type, “Happy Birthday, dear Chandra, may God bless you.” It becomes HBDDCMGBY. Modern-day hieroglyphics. The ancient Egyptians used birds and snakes. We use balloons and cake.
I used to love writing letters. There was a time when I corresponded regularly with my daughters, Kavya and Shruti. Long messages. Thoughtful messages. Then technology entered the chat.
My beautiful, paragraph-writing daughters slowly transformed into emoji-generating, abbreviation-producing machines. Their evolution went like this: “Ok Acha bye love you” to “Ok Acha” to “K Cha”, then “K” and finally “ ” (seen 11:08 am).
I tried keeping up. They moved from WhatsApp to Facebook. I followed. They migrated to Instagram. I migrated. If tomorrow they shift to Mars, I suspect I’ll be in a spacesuit behind them, muttering, “Vidamaatein!”
But truth be told, nothing in this hyper-connected world compares to that magical sentence: “You’ve got a letter.” Not “You’ve got a notification.” Not “Your phone has 19 pending messages from the apartment WhatsApp group.”
Shakespeare, in Hamlet, through his character Polonius, said, “Brevity is the soul of wit” (mea culpa! I googled it; I knew the phrase, not its provenance). I am no reader of minds, but I doubt the late playwright had today's severely emasculated, mutilated WhatsApp language in mind. WhatsApp and other social media are places where nuance breathes its last—platforms where an innocuous comment is misread and a social storm ensues.
A physical letter had weight, character, smell and soul. A “ping” has none of that. Just anxiety. Will that romance ever return? Looking at the current state of communication, I suspect not.
But these old letters, like this one from 1973, remind me that we once wrote with intention, attention, and affection.
PS: Aug 27 — by cosmic coincidence — also happens to be the day Geetha and I got married, exactly 6,205 days after the letter was written. Clearly, good things keep happening on this date.