Love for the write stuff

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They represent the generation that identifies itself best with technology and they seem to be loving and embracing the new innovations. Most of them have spent their impressionable years in front of the computer sending frequent emails and chatting. Some have also enjoyed new ways of listening to music (iPod) and some prefer to download latest tunes from the Net. Let us not forget that from sending gifts to their friends online, today’s teens have achieved almost everything with a click of the mouse.

However, today the picture is changing. Call it an urge to “return to tradition” or a genuine fascination for “the real thing”, youngsters are now reviving the bygone era of ink pens, film cameras, and floppy disks terming them as “cool maal”.
For Gen Y the typewriter is passé. Instead of checking email accounts, a long wait for inland letters is what today’s youngsters prefer. Kuldeep Sharma, a second year student of Satyawati College is one of the many guys in his circle, who believes that a hand-written letter is more special than an online greeting card. “I personally feel sending a hand-written letter always has something real about it. Unlike an electronic mail, a hand-written letter on paper would always be more personal. Many might refute it by saying it’s time-consuming, but I always believe that a hand-written letter helps a reader know more about the emotions with which the writer has written the letter. And if you ask me, it’s been 11 years since I have been sending hand-written letters to my girlfriend in Bengaluru,” he grins.
The same is the case with ink pens, walkmans and film cameras. Many might think the days of compiling an audio cassette with one’s favourite songs to gift someone on Valentine’s Day have passed, but ask Samriddhi Tanti of Miranda College, and she will tell you, how she still records songs on audiotapes every time there is an occasion to exchange gifts.
“A lot of my friends call me ‘queen of the stone age’ as I usually like things, which are long lost among today’s youth. For example, compiling songs on audiotapes. My brother used to give me such gifts when I was in Class 5 and it had such an impact on me that I still do it for my friends to show, as a symbolic gesture, how much I genuinely care for them,” she justifies.
Ipsita Shah, a student along with a gift and chocolates wrote a note to her beau on his birthday recently. “He was really touched, and has got the letter framed. He told me that he reads it daily and by now has memorised it,” she smiles. Rayshita Sachdev, 21, says that while she’s constantly in touch with her boyfriend over the phone and Internet, she often surprises him when she writes a letter to him. “I guess he’ll have quite a collection by now. It so happens that, I am not able to explain anything to him after a fight, but a letter helps us sort out our differences,” she says.

Debarun Borthakur
The Asian Age