Skip to main content

Writing without pen and paper

My little world


When I was a little kid, I saw my elder brother using palm leaves for learning the Malayalam alphabet. That’s how the preschools in Kerala worked in the early 1960s. Those preschools were a far cry from their counterparts of today; they were terror centres. The teacher, known as äsän (guru) in Malayalam, was Kerala’s version of Dickens’s Gradgrind. The äsän didn’t teach, he ground the alphabet and numbers into the tender skins of the little kids. He used a cane when he thought all those pinches on arms, earlobes and thighs were not enough incentives for the little ones to master the bizarrely twisted letters of Malayalam.

The äsän was such a terror that I refused to go to the preschool. I was fortunate to have a father who accepted my stubbornness. He, my father, decided to teach me. He was a good teacher. I learnt the outlandish twists of Malayalam alphabet [have a look at the first few letters to understand how tough it was for a kid to reproduce them; and they always began with these first letters: അ, ആ, ഇ, ഉ, എ] without my arms, ears and thighs being subjected to perverse pedagogical pleasures.

The palm leaves were replaced with books and slates by the time my little fingers began to associate themselves with the agonies and ecstasies of learning. My fingers grew used to letters and words. They must have written a few million pages before I acquired a portable typewriter in 1989.

The typewriter was for typing out articles which I wrote for some local newspapers in Shillong those days. Actual writing was continued for years. Letters to friends and relatives were always handwritten. When was the last time I wrote someone a handwritten letter?

I don’t remember. When the telephone became common enough, I stopped writing letters. That was some time in the early 1990s. Shillong was still a backward little town with hardly a phone in private homes. People made use of kiosks called PCOs [Public Call Office]. The rates were exorbitant. I remember paying Rs 80 per minute for making a call from Shillong to Kerala during daytime. At night the rates would be half. Shillong was not a town that had much night life in those days. So your conversations on the phone were measured and weighed. Just the right words. Maximum info in minimum words. Laughter was out of question. Sighs were suppressed. Letters were better: they could carry the sighs between the lines.

But letters died a natural death as the phone became common and the rates were made comparatively more affordable. The inland letters and stamped envelopes disappeared from my table. With the arrival of the computer at what was called rather ominously as the cybercafé, even the greeting cards disappeared. Greetings went digital.

Do I miss writing/receiving letters? I don’t think I do. I don’t even use my phone nowadays except to connect to the social media and the blog and the omniscient Google. Virtual relationships that remain somewhere in the miasma beyond the clouds of physical reach are good enough for me.

The smiley in that virtual world is as hollow as the gif. Words are hollower. Truth has been appropriated by the bigot. The sterile thunder in a bleak sky has arrogated love to itself. There are too many slogans that sound nice and burst like bombs somewhere in the netherworld of your longings.

I have withdrawn myself from the marketplace of love. Let patriots and nationalists trade in love. And truth. Social distancing has been a blessing for me for years. Words are virtual reality that doesn’t require pen and paper. What a journey has it been from the palm leaves of my kid-days  to the 4G phone on which I'm poking in this...!


Comments

  1. I came late to your blog this year but your posts brought back a rush of memories related to books. I'm still a pen and paper writer. Even today, the first outline of my stories are always on paper. Congratulations on the successful completion of yet another A2Z challenge.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Congrats to you too, Sonia. It was nice being with you this month.

      Delete
  2. Congratulations on completion of the challenge... I had been visiting your blog before the challenge and will continue to do so... To derive some inspiration to write... And to write better :)!

    Pen and paper... Well, has got replaced for me with the mobile now... Virtual world has taken over!! I don't think I miss pen and paper but yes virtual world and phone keypad may be convinient but pen and paper is and has always been that lost first love which I only reminisce now for nothing is as therapeutic!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks and congrats to you too. Your poems engaged me in april.

      I use the laptop more than the phone. Pen and paper are out anyway.

      Delete
  3. Congratulations :)
    Beautiful written.
    Stay well.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I miss writing letters...not many I've written just handful of them. I was in the middle when internet came in and yes the telecommunication was a costly affair. I remember that as well.. Thanks for bringing the 90s. The much evident change was 20s, the drastic one as well...ahh nostalgic..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We can expect more drastic changes in days to come.

      Delete
    2. order food online near me

      https://getgotgrub.com

      Your favorite restaurant's pickup or delivery you choose! We have our local Pig's Breath Grill online which offers you special food with a discount, from local favorite restaurants, you can easily order food online with us get.

      Delete
  5. I never got to write letters with pen and paper. The only letters I've written are to pen-pals through email. Now letters seem pointless with the ease of instant chatting. But I like hand-written letters. There being no backspace when writing with a pen, I find it raw and authentic. I have an occasional habit of writing letters to my future self. I find it fun to check how much I've changed when I read it much later.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Handwritten things are personal, they exude that personal touch. Digital writings lack that touch. But the world has to go on ahead, not backward. Even I have given up writing by hand.

      Delete
    2. So fluid in its flow...the narration turns poetic...nostalgia paints the past into present....leaving a suspense that it might soon paint the future....the change, whether physical, psychological, emotional, perceptional or philosophical or some or all, may happen in a life or in legacy it carries....life adapts itself to it or takes refuge to its fallen leaves...but, it leaves a path behind to trace back...to remeber those pebbles on the way...and, they tell more tales long forgotten....of losing something, gaining something, ignoring something and loving something...it sketches life upon life....for the future to roll into a large canvas of life
      My regards

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Remedios the Beauty and Innocence

  Remedios the Beauty is a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude . Like most members of her family, she too belongs to solitude. But unlike others, she is very innocent too. Physically she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, the place where the story of her family unfolds. Is that beauty a reflection of her innocence? Well, Marquez doesn’t suggest that explicitly. But there is an implication to that effect. Innocence does make people look charming. What else is the charm of children? Remedios’s beauty is dangerous, however. She is warned by her great grandmother, who is losing her eyesight, not to appear before men. The girl’s beauty coupled with her innocence will have disastrous effects on men. But Remedios is unaware of “her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman.” She is too innocent to know such things though she is an adult physically. Every time she appears before outsiders she causes a panic of exasperation. To make...

The Death of Truth and a lot more

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies. He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are ...

The Covenant of Water

Book Review Title: The Covenant of Water Author: Abraham Verghese Publisher: Grove Press UK, 2023 Pages: 724 “What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.” This massive book explores the intricacies of human relationships with a plot that spans almost a century. The story begins in 1900 with 12-year-old Mariamma being wedded to a 40-year-old widower in whose family runs a curse: death by drowning. The story ends in 1977 with another Mariamma, the granddaughter of Mariamma the First who becomes Big Ammachi [grandmother]. A lot of things happen in the 700+ pages of the novel which has everything that one may expect from a popular novel: suspense, mystery, love, passion, power, vulnerability, and also some social and religious issues. The only setback, if it can be called that at all, is that too many people die in this novel. But then, when death by drowning is a curse in the family, we have to be prepared for many a burial. The Kerala of the pre-Independ...

Koorumala Viewpoint

  Koorumala is at once reticent and coquettish. It is an emerging tourist spot in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. At an altitude of 169 metres from MSL, the viewpoint is about 40 km from Kochi. The final stretch of the road, about 2 km, is very narrow. It passes through lush green forest-looking topography. The drive itself is exhilarating. And finally you arrive at a 'Pay & Park' signboard on a rocky terrain. The land belongs to the CSI St Peter's Church. You park your vehicle there and walk up a concrete path which leads to a tiled walkway which in turn will take you the viewpoint. Below are some pictures of the place.  From the parking lot to the viewpoint The tiled walkway A selfie from near the view tower  A view from the tower Another view The tower and the rest mandap at the back Koorumala viewpoint is a recent addition to Kerala's tourist map. It's a 'cool' place for people of nearby areas to spend some leisure in splendid isolation from the hu...