The LunchBox And Those Letters!

    Letter writing has certainly been one of the most creative streams in the field of literature. Answers to when this act of letter-writing became a part of literature, or, when intellect and creativity found a mouthpiece through this act of letter-writing are not part of the discussion here. In this piece, we try to find out the relevance of this craft in the context of the current society.
                                               It is widely believed -- through evidence and records -- that lengthy conversation in an indulgent and unpretentious way paved the way for writing and sending letters to near and dear ones. Some of those texts had so much matter in them, and had so much substance in them that, over a period, these handwritten, self-composed letters became part of several historical archives and sources of research and study.
       Sitting on a sofa couch, writing text using a computer keyboard, breathing the air of 2015 and feeling nostalgic give me a highly paradoxical sense. In this rusty, gutsy, clumsy, and showy world, literature is still there, for, it is a perennial tree. But some of its leaves, namely some of those astonishing pieces of art created by people like Keats, Byron, Tagore, Horace Walpole, through their crafty letters, have become a matter of the past! SMS, MMS, IMs, High Speed Chat, Super High Speed Chat, Tweets etc. are marvels of the modern world, and one salutes them - all these means are so easy, and so simple and so quick. Since most of these "new habits" bring with them a sense of rejection of certain "old habits", that expensive post-card which needs to be fetched from a post-office, and which needs to be filled up with words from a pen, thus producing a "hard-copy", are far too time-consuming these days! A G Gardiner in his famous essay "On Letter Writing" said:

It is the difficulty or the scarcity of a thing that makes it treasured. If diamonds were as plentiful as pebbles we shouldn't stoop to pick them up.

                    While we will return to Gardiner towards the end of this piece, I must share with the readers the pleasant surprise I had while watching a new movie from India - The Lunchbox. The plot goes like this:

                     A woman is going through a failed marriage; she knows her husband has moved on in 'his' life. Yet, the couple must stay together, the obligations are too much -- a daughter provides a fragile bridge between the woman and the husband. Then, there is another man who is a widower, who is alone, and for whom time has been standing still ever since his wife had left him forever. Finally, there is a lunchbox which is carried by Mumbai Dabbawalahs (a group of professionals who carry lunchboxes from homes or restaurants to offices). Their efficiency is spot on, the organization has earned distinction from International Agencies. The lonely woman sends lunchbox for her husband, but the carriers make a rare mistake and the lunchbox ends up in the hand of the widower. Though each one comes to know of this anomaly, they decide to not correct it. Instead they start to build up a righteous companionship taking help of this daily error. Two completely unknown people strike a friendship. The loneliness in the discordant lives soon find self-expression and both can convey their situation through written words, via letters. The woman would send a letter folded inside the lunchbox and the man would send a reply in the same way and they would not do anything to correct the anomaly of wrong destination back and forth. In the end, a final meeting is destined to happen. The road to that is a bunch of handwritten letters, the same old craft that once stirred lovers of pure literature. 
                                                                                                                                In those letters come reminiscence, recollections, advises, suggestions, concerns and depictions. Those letters take the story forward, symbolize the dialogues and make the principal characters come alive!
                                        Now, this poignant story is a great example of the fact that any form of pure art can never get lost. It can only be partially forgotten, or systematically neglected. But it can never vanish. The movie works on various levels, it touches the sentiments of several lonely people, including those that we meet in our daily lives. Perhaps the commonality of a paper, the smell of a ballpoint pen, the adventure of unfolding the letter and the romance of finding what it contains bring nostalgia back to our high-paced life. The normalcy that this nostalgia brings can hardly be compared to a "LOL" or "BRB" or "IMO" etc. etc. This normalcy is devoid of pretensions on one hand and filled with spontaneity on the other hand. The normalcy turns itself into a romance in the end. Watching LunchBox makes me feel very happy, for, I realize that written words and letters could still be relevant. Besides, I feel a stamp of approval to the words from Gardiner that I once read many years back:
                       
                In short, to write a good letter you must approach the job in the lightest and most casual way. You must be personal, not abstract. You must not say, "This is too small a thing to put down." You must say, "This is just the sort of small thing we talk about at home. If I tell them this they will see me, as it were, they'll hear my voice, they'll know what I'm about." That is the purpose of a letter.

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