Lounge
The pure magic of handwritten letters
Summary
In a digital world, Gen Z and Alpha go analogue, taking to slow communication with inland letters, postcards and other creative missives
Last July, Zahir Mirza sent his pre-teen, Ayaan, to Sahyadri School in Maharashtra, where access to phones is limited and students are encouraged to write letters. Mirza, a professor of visual communication and design thinking at Sir JJ School of Arts in Mumbai, started sending illustrated letters to his son. The topics range from reminiscences about their holidays, educational subjects with water-coloured drawings, explaining phrases like rabbit hole and recounting cricket matches with detailed portraits of players. Even the envelope has a small illustration. According to Mirza, “It makes the postman happy." As one would imagine, these letters are a rage with his son’s friends too. Ayaan responds to the letters with simple notes, giving updates about his school life.
One day, when Mirza was visiting his son, he was told the principal, Rajesh Santhanam, wanted to see him. Fearing his son was in trouble, he was surprised when Santhanam said, “Mr Mirza, this is unfair. You have not written a letter to me as yet." A few weeks later, Santhanam received two illustrated letters addressed to him.
There is something profound about receiving and sending letters. It’s a tangible memory, a document frozen in time and the act of writing demands the kind of human involvement that WhatsApp messages don’t offer. In a world steeped in digital communication, the act of writing a missive is inherently human. It starts with selecting the right paper, ink colour, penning down thoughts, sealing the envelope and then dropping it into a postbox.
As Mirza, who writes to his son every Sunday, puts it, “A letter is devoid of AI prompts which interfere with self-reflection and correct erroneous spellings or grammar. It’s okay to have a few mistakes that you strike out, or write in Hing-lish if that’s the language in which you can best express yourself. Your handwriting communicates your personality in a way that Helvetica or Calibri cannot."
There is a growing subculture of letter writers, fuelled by initiatives organised by schools, startups, hobby groups, and by the apex government body India Post. It reflects the larger shift of returning to analogue—be it through the rise in popularity of vinyls, film cameras and the comeback of hobbies like gardening.
Also read: The unbeatable warmth of love letters
This month, India Post introduced the nationwide campaign, Forever in Letters. On 9 February they placed booths outside the post office at Connaught Place in Delhi. Postcards and inland letters were kept free of cost to encourage passers-by to send a letter to their loved ones. India Post has been attempting to revive letter writing for several years. In 2017, they introduced the letter writing competition, Dhai Akhar. A nationwide competition open to all—there’s a cash prize—the letters can be written in English, Hindi or any Indian language and addressed to the chief postmaster general. This year the theme was “The Joy of Writing: Importance of Letters in a Digital Age". The last date of submission was 31 January, and they received over 700,000 entries.
“At India Post, we deeply cherish the art of letter writing and the heartfelt connections it fosters. We believe our Forever in Letters nationwide campaign will allow us to express our feelings in a personal and meaningful way and will bring warmth to our relationships. Through the Dhai Akhar national-level letter writing competition, we inspire children of current generation to discover the joy of handwritten communication in a world that’s becoming more digital every day," says Vandita Kaul, secretary, department of posts, Dak Bhawan in New Delhi.
Generation Alpha and Generation Z are integral to such a revival. For this age-group, saturated in Instagram direct messages, WhatsApp and Artificial Intelligence, letter writing with the intent of putting thoughts on paper is an option they can choose to avoid. Nearly every person from these age-groups who writes letters has been encouraged or influenced by a family member or teacher.
Mumbai-based Ayaskant Parija, 25, was introduced to letters by a teacher in class IX, who would send letters or postcards to her students and encourage them to write back. Parija, who is currently pursuing an MBA from DY Patil Institute of Distance Learning, “got a kick" out of this assignment and began to write letters to his cousins in Odisha. In 2021, he discovered the global postcard exchange website Postcrossings.com. The platform, created in 2005, is the modern version of making pen-pals. The only condition is that those who sign up need to send postcards to any corner of the world and the reward is they receive one back. One can design a handmade postcard, send something representative of their interest, city or country. Parija calls it a beautiful bonding experience.
Last month, Parija extended his interest to volunteer for the interactive festival, The Letter Writing Carnival, organised by the startup Daakroom, which creates events, products and experiences around letter writing. The multi-city carnival, supported by India Post and which started in 2015-16, has travelled to Allahabad, Chandigarh, Delhi, and held its first edition in Mumbai. Festivals like these are brimming with nostalgia with paper-crafts, letter writing competitions and a visit by a postman on his bicycle in his khaki uniform. There’s a postbox at the carnival, and he collects letters from there and cycles through the venue, in a throwback to the old times.
“The most heartwarming feedback we received was from a 30-something visitor who said he came in as an adult, and was leaving as a child," says Harnehmant Kaur, co-founder of Daakroom.
When I visited the Mumbai carnival, it was packed with children. At a stationery booth, I met an 11-year-old philatelist and author, Katyayani Mahurkar. She was standing by a pile of her newest novella Snail Mail Me!. When I asked her how she picked up letter writing, she pointed to her older brother, Ramprasad, 21, who was in a wheelchair, chatting with other visitors. When I requested an interview, she gave me her mother Pooja Mahurkar’s number.
Over a phone call, Pooja narrated the moving story of her children’s love for pen, paper and philately. When Ramprasad was 6, he was diagnosed with the degenerative condition of muscular dystrophy, putting him in a wheelchair and leaving him increasingly lonely. She was a “mother in panic".
To build friendships for her son, she started a Facebook page for him—monitored by her—signed him up for various clubs and opened a philatelic deposit account (PDA) at the general post office as a way to start a new hobby of stamp collecting to keep him occupied. One has to deposit money in it on a regular basis to receive new stamps issued by the Indian Postal Service and receive information about philately exhibitions, which helps form a community.
She encouraged her son to write letters to his Facebook friends, mostly adults, including family, teachers and people known to the parents. He sent hundreds of letters in a year and a few who received them, posted photos on their social media timelines, creating virality.
At the same time, he developed a love for nature and butterflies as a member of the Bombay Natural History Society. It spilled over into philately when he started collecting stamps of butterflies. At one of the philately exhibitions by India Post, Ramprasad came across a booth by Postcrossings.com, and started writing to Postcrossers around the world. Ramprasad, a bachelor of arts’ student at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai, is now promoting letter writing in Braille for the visually challenged to create meaningful relationships and build communities, almost mirroring his journey. “If you understand and care for the person you are writing to, it will create marvels," he says.
It is this power of empathetic communication that mental health professionals and theatre practitioners are attempting to harness. Pooja Jain, senior therapist and founder of the counselling business Safe Spaces in Pune, sends letters to her clients. “Letter writing is a narrative practice in therapy. They offer me an opportunity to reconnect with my clients in between sessions. A lot of times after our meetings, they leave with curiosity and questions that they could have missed, and even I am left with the yearning to know more about them. Letters are a way to extend these sessions and document these answers or ask questions. People witness their emotions, especially the messy ones, differently on paper. Also, it gives them the agency to express themselves in a way that wouldn’t have been possible during a session because they were listening to their therapist," she says.
AN EXCHANGE OF EQUALS
Honest self-expression through letters puts the sender and the receiver on an equal pedestal. Each feels they are spoken to and not spoken at, observes theatre practitioner Tanvi Shah, 31. She is the founder of the group Jaan Theatre which started in December. Shah was studying theatre in Scotland (2018-19) when she got an assignment to work on a piece from scratch. During that time, there were protests in India against the Citizenship Amendment Act.
She noticed that when social media is awash with such sensitive conversations, people consumed by the fervour of mass movements end up “speaking at" others. In her creative endeavour, she reflected on the things that go unsaid and came up with letters that are unsent. She crowd-sourced such letters and created a theatre piece titled Unshared Childhoods in 2019. Shah is now based in Mumbai, and the play will be presented next week in the city. She says there is a segment that involves the audience writing letters too.
The marvellous and moving world of letters need not involve an envelope with an address; it could be just a note to the family. Ashima Kaul’s family met in December in the US to celebrate her 60th birthday. Her daughter and son-in-law live in the Bay Area in California, while her son and his girlfriend flew down from Mumbai. The Jammu-based freelance journalist decided to pen a letter to all four of them.
After the birthday celebrations, the family sat down together where she read out the four letters—more or less the same length. Her one condition: that they should not interrupt her, and let her have her say. Kaul says she loses her train of thought when she’s talking and is more expressive when she jots things down.
She says, laughing, that for one whole week her son-in-law kept asking her why she had written certain things about him. That was the good thing that came of those letters—it opened up space for communication and discussion, she says.
To her son’s girlfriend, Kaul wrote that she did not follow her on Instagram because she did not want to know her from social media but one-on-one, through personal interactions, like going out for dinner or drinks. And though they had different ideologies, there should be room to share and express each other’s views openly.
Would she be writing more letters? Kaul says she has told the family that she will write to them now on her 70th birthday.
(With inputs from Nipa Charagi)
