Name: Wynoma. Year: 1990. Class: Chemistry

A letter to the class of 1999

The internet has intruded into our lives and we have forgotten the good old art of sending greeting cards by the Indian Postal Service.

While I was in Goa with my wife, her name is Stuthi for those who need to be reminded time and again, I happened to stumble upon the old letters and greeting cards I had received from all our People's batchmates. I must tell you guys and girls, that those greeting cards and letters sent me on a nostalgic trip and I was literally in tears. By God, I am longing again for those good old days, what with the flurry of letters and greeting cards that found their way to each other's houses.

Those cards and letters were pregnant with feelings of love, joy, happiness, sadness.
They contained everything. Some of those letters and greetings cards were indeed a stamp of the sender, their emotions palpable between the scrawls of lines inked on the paper. All of that is missing in this internet world. I have letters from Harsha, Vivek, Maria, Samir, Neville. I wonder whether Vivek is reading this mail now, where is he but I was surprised to find his card. Those were the days.

It was good to have people write to you because you could identify with them through their handwriting, their style of words, their state of mind etc. could be seen in the writings itself. All the letters I received from the guys and gals in Peoples HSS, I have stored them. I just happened to read some of the letters and I found that certain incidents in my life which I had forgotten were all there in the letters. For e.g. Harsha wrote to me that I had not visited her on one of my visit to Goa from Bangalore. Now the fact that I used to visit Harsha at her house had totally slipped out of my mind. then I remembered that I used to go to Harsha's place whenever I went down to Goa.

Another thing those letters also reminded me was of the times when the intensity of our friendship was at its highest. It was just after we all had finished our 12th and were branching out to different colleges with various aims and different priorities in life. But we had that longing and desire that the threads of our friendships and companionship and camaraderie that we enjoyed while at People's should not be broken.
You will not believe it my dear friends, but some of the letters which I have with me told me of a time when we treasured memories of our days in People's HSS and we wanted our memories to continue. It was like as if some unseen eraser was about to erase our memories and we were like frantically racing against time to pen them down in ink and paper before the memories got wiped away.

Then again the letters spoke of a desperate attempt to catch the fading light of our memories. An attempt to close the distance between our friends and us as slowly each one of us took a different turn at the next bend in life, as our careers carried us to different shores around the globe. It was as if we were running after a kite which had snapped from the thread. We wanted to desperately catch the last string but it was just beyond our grasp and finally we just stand still and watch it dip, flutter, flounder and disappear into the horizon. But we know fully well that the kite which we lost would be found by someone else in the street beyond or somewhere else.

Similarly in those letters, there are talks of tearful farewells, of a hope that we will meet again someday, of promises to never forget a friendship, of journeys across the seas to different countries. And between the lines is an unwritten story that we have to give up some things to attain and obtain some other things. While some of us have got married and settled into a life with our spouses, some of our friends are still fighting the lonely battle.

When I read those old letters again, I felt a twinge of guilt because having got a wonderful and understanding spouse, I probably would have forgotten all my friends and classmates who at some point of time would have been the dearest thing in life in those uncertain years of teens and adolescence and the twilight zone between childhood and adulthood. Those friends or classmates in our case would have been the next best thing to have happened to us during those 11th and 12th days when the chemistry practicals under Wynoma were just an excuse to chat with each other across the shelves lined with bottles of acids and neutral agents. When we would have used our friends to pour out our woes -- both tales of love and sorrow.

But now the times have changed and the modes of communications have also changed. Our priorities too have changed, our goals and aims have changed, our friends, our thinking and perspective would have changed and probably will change as the time goes by. Those old address books containing the names and addresses of all those who were close to us which we carried everywhere as if they were the passport to our happiness are probably lying unused in some attic somewhere or they probably would have been destroyed because of the fact they were not used.

But should we allow the ravages of time to overtake us and allow the relentless winds of change, technology and distance to restrict our freedom of expression and thought to just a few emails here and there and an occasional cold and impersonal b'day wish on the internet?

I am surprised by the thoughts and emotions what a few old letters brought up in me.

Now that I know what a letter written in ink and paper can convey, I am more than willing to spend a few rupees to write a letter to each one of our friends and classmates if only we can collect all our house addresses and compile a list to be circulated on the mailing list.

What say Buchun.

So here goes...
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Dearest .......
I trust that this letter of mine finds you in the best of health as the same attends to me over by the grace of God and your prayers. I received your letter on April 30th in the middle of my exams. I just came home and the post man dropped the letter through the door.........
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