typed and scratched

One of my favourite writers, C.K. Meena in Bangalore wrote that in the paperless society of the future, every single word would have been gobbled up by cyberspace. She asks us to imagine not leaving behind a physical trace of our ability to write.
This is what she writes in The Hindu.

I HAD to respond.

An adorable oldish woman I know has never understood how to move the mouse. The little arrow seems to dart around where it pleases, and she's always wide off the mark. And when unfamiliar windows pop up, she jumps right out of her chair in panic. All she wanted to do was check email, for god's sake!! But what did all those squiggly blinking things mean?

Well, at least she asks.

This oldish woman needs her letter writer. Just like all those letter writers who used to sit outside post offices ready to help the unlettered. Only, this generation's letter writer is digital, using TEN fingers and a mouse (actually it's way cooler to be a keyboard person). It's a story similar to the one about how the postman took over the carrier pigeons. I'm glad about that, because there is no more opportunity for bird crap to dot my balcony, even if it's digested Italian worms on the day I get overseas mail.

Another oldish man I know thinks he's too grown-up to ask for a letter writer. He's like the villager who could never read his son's letters from abroad because he was too proud to approach the letter writer. His son would never say he loved his old man, but he'd write pages and pages about how much he missed him. Now we zip many years and mediums ahead from then to today. This oldish man I know never reads the thrilled SMSes I send about how I made the perfect rasam today, or "That's MY hand holding the mike on TV at 9!!" He could ask someone how to check SMSes. Instead, he simply complains that I never write on inland letters as often as I used to.

SMSes never bring you the sob in someone's voice as they cry about a job interview they didn't get through; they never have the dots of i's turned into little hearts, and the tails of y's crashing into the heads of p's in the next line. But by virtue of being typed furiously and received almost instantly, every letter of the SMS is dripping in the emotion of the moment. The oldish man didn't know this, and waited for the inland letter. When the blue paper arrived, it, well, made a great essay.

It is disturbing to think about all of us dying off without leaving a physical trace of being able to write. But everyone hasn't stopped writing. More people have started. When you know the receiver won't die of cardiac arrest when she sees your spelling, you'll write more freely, more often. Yes, we write less on paper to our closest friends, but write on email/talk on phone to many more we love but didn't know how to communicate effectively with.

Earlier, my dear oldish woman used to wait for after 10 o'clock to call me on half-rate STD. And even as she was yelling (trunk call hangover) to me about how pleased she was at knowing I'd handed a bouquet in school to her favourite Malayalam actor, she'd suddenly hear a warning beep and hang up before she could tell me goodnight-and-pray-to-god-everyday. And everyone knows how shattering that can be. That conversation would end there because she was embarrassed about writing to me. Because she couldn't write in straight lines, or use stylish sounding English words like my oldish man did in his inland letters. But now she dictates in Tamil to a software, and it gives me an English display when I receive the email. We talk much more. She gets to crib about my tan and dark circles on the webcam once in a while, and I know she made theeyal today.

We still might be very far from including the unlettered completely in all this communication, but at least the 'semi-literate' have more of a chance to sock the smug educated in the eye. While playing their own game.

So really, let's keep writing while we still have the oldish man and woman around.