Chitti aayi hai? Aathi thi!

When life tends to become dull and tarnished, as it usually does once in a while, I take up some perilous tasks to put me back on track. Don’t start guessing now, what I meant by perilous was something like reading or helping mom in her chores or stuff like that. So what was I upto now, you ask? Well, I was into cleaning my closet – probably I do as frequently as Royal Challengers Bangalore manage to win in the IPL. Whilst I was underway in this daunting task, what I stumbled across took back me a couple of years. So what was that I tripped on? A bunch of old letters!

It was those days – in Navodaya (Oh man, I love telling stories about that!). The year that I enrolled, was ‘99 and I was in the 6^th standard. It was agony, to be away from home, but had to live with it. What do I do to share my misery? I looked at new domains to spread my distress. That was when I looked upon my great family. Cousins whom I used to meet during the vacations when either they came visiting us or we visited them, suddenly became my closest of friends, with whom I shared all my feelings. That was when I started to write – a beginning of the blogger, you can say.

There were two cousins in particular, call them “S” and “V”, with whom I had these correspondence for a great deal of time. Specially “S”, with whom it continued for 5 years at a stretch. Our Navodaya, being remotely located, letters used to take nearly 10 days to reach me. Yet, the communication through letters brought so much joy with it. It was a routine, to write letters. Checking the letters in the heap of letters was a joy in itself.

What we used to write didn’t stop only at venting at feeling, but even we used to write about computer games, current affairs, actresses who looked great in movies, criticising the government, performances in class tests and so on... With “V”, the correspondence was sporadic. Every letter of his contained his address, ‘cos he changed the houses so frequently. As said, the letters between me and “S” kept on going for about 5 years. He even has a collection of all of my letters written to him. From what we used to just play with during the vacations, we became so very close friends. Even now, after the flow of letters has stopped, we 3 along with all the other younger cousins share a wonderful rapport.

Now, when I get to my apartment, there is a huge letter-stand being mounted. But alas, I have no one to write to. The technology has eased up our lives in so many dimensions, but there are certain pleasantries that we are being denied. All we do to communicate with the ones far away is either by phone or through the internet. But, the real pleasure is in writing and receiving letters. Those who did write definitely would be in accord.