When was the last time you received a mail? No, I'm not talking about e-mail or the junk mails that you find everyday stuffed inside your mailbox, telling you how to lose that big fat 50 pound gut in 5 days or “Congratulations!“ and how this is your only chance to claim that $100,000 you won in some lottery that you never heard of and those terms that you can’t decipher even if you were to hire a lawyer with a magnifying glass. No, I wasn’t referring to any of those rather a proper letter - you know the one that comes neatly folded inside an envelope, sheets of paper with someone’s handwriting on it? The ones that someone cared enough to think of you, take time to sit down and composed his/her thoughts into written words and then drop it in a mailbox in his/her way to work or school?

Well I don’t know about you, but it’s been quite sometime since I got one of those. And so I was pleasantly surprise to come home and find an envelope sitting on my bed the other day. I picked it up and realized its from my best friend living across the pond, in England. Tearing it up I found a present wrapped inside, a vday card, a DVD sampler and…a letter. The present was something that I wanted to get for myself, but hadn’t got around to it; the card was hilarious; the DVD is of the show that I’m a huge fan of - its all great! But it’s the letter that accompanied was something I’m not used to getting often these days and can’t remember the last time I received one.

But that didn’t used to be the case years ago.

Some of my fondest memories, when I was a little kid would’ve to be the ones of receiving letters from my cousins living in different cities. We were all great buddies (being around the same age range) but only got to see each other once or twice a year when we’d have tons of fun and then miss them for the rest of the year. And so getting mails from them used to be a delight - and what letters they used to be: filled with drawings, fun little secrets, storied from their school, what’s hot and what’s not and all that! I’d read them over and wished they hadn’t live away from us. I then used to sit down and reply to them (sometimes my mom would ‘guide’ me in the process: “don’t‘ forget to greet your uncle/aunt.” “tell them how you did in your school“ “wish them well at the end.“ etc. etc.). and my letters eventually contained lines like “how are the rabbits I saw last time? Did they have new babies? If so, how many?”

That was many, many years ago.

Now all my cousins are grown up; live in different continents and I barely hear from them.

Going back to where I was - A letter isn’t just a piece of paper containing some information - its an experience, an experience that you lack in other mediums of communication. And you experience it with more than one sense: when you read a letter you can see someone’s handwritten letters tangling up into words and not just some generic lifeless typeface on a computer screen; you hold the tangible paper that its written on; you hear it make rustling noises (if its more than one page), and if you are anything like me, who’s into savoring the smell of new books and magazines…yes, you can verify the freshness of the letter as well! As you can see, it engages us in almost all primary senses, except for one. (letters aren’t written to make dry paper edible anyway.)

I hope more and more people still find the time to write letters. In today’s busy world of emails and instant massages, conventional reasoning may say otherwise but there’s just something magical, honest and humane about handwritten letters that you simply can’t substitute by anything else.

And so, next time when you have some time, take up a pen and a piece of paper, think of a friend or a family, write a letter and make his/her day! =)