On Penpals

Today we have Facebook and a host of social networking sites where we have people whom we know intimately, those who we know well and even those whom we don't know that well. We all come on a common forum and associate digitally. But did you know that long before this happened there were old timers(like me) who had friends called penpals - who had never met each other, who had never talked to each other over the phone, but communicated all the time through ordinary post? Yes, and they trusted each other with full conviction and there was no need for subterfuge like the ones we see on Facebook or Twitter, such as fake profiles, gender and age faking. There was no subterfuge of the kind we saw sometime back on Yahoo chat rooms and Messenger profiles, either. The pen did the talking - hence the name - penpal.
When I was just beginning to read Enid Blyton novels for children of the age group 8-10, I had this deep seated wish to have a penpal, if possible several penpals.
Those days, some magazines had a special page dedicated to penpals - mostly international, but that didn't go very well with me. You might face the same subterfuge we now see on social networking sites.
So I asked my Non Resident uncles and aunts, who were scattered all over the world - Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Oman, Kuwait, et al- all of them science or English teachers, and even two uncles who worked on merchant navy ships, travelling all across the globe- to find a suitable penpal for me. Yes, this was sometime in the early eighties.
One aunt in Nigeria responded that her students even in the teens could not put together an English word. I got the same response from my other relatives working in the other African countries.
My aunt said, "It would be very difficult to find a penpal for you here. We don't want to connect you to an idiot." She did send a short note describing the politics, geography, trade and tribal groups of Nigeria.
I had a cousin of nearly my same age who stayed with his parents in Kuwait at that time, so I asked him if he could be my penpal. We could start by exchanging postal stamps, I said. I had a sizable stamp and coin collection those days, mostly inherited from another uncle also in Kuwait.
My cousin in Kuwait replied to my letter with the customary - how are you? how are your dad and mum?  - the "Dr Livingstone I presume" stuff. That was the first and last mail from him. Either he was not very good at English, or didn't have the patience or time to write letters or found postal communication boring. But he did include a couple of dozen Kuwaiti stamps with that air mail.
And let me add one thing - air mail from the Gulf countries took about one month to reach, unlike the spontaneous email!
My desire for a penpal went unrealized for some years.
I had a series of postal communication with one of my uncles in Oman who worked as an English teacher in a government school there, following a suggestion by my father. My uncle replied to each of my letter diligently.
He became my de facto penpal after that! I must mention that I had at that time never met this uncle in person and neither the cousin in Kuwait I mentioned earlier, for the times they visited Kerala never coincided with our annual migratory visits to Kerala.
Communicating with children is not as easy as some people make it to be. It is not coming down to the child's level, but just the opposite! Successful communication with a child is rather complex, and there is a need to see through the child's eyes. I think that is why we don't see a lot many successful children's books in the market. An adult forgets how it feels to be a child during the growing up period.
But this uncle was special. Whenever he wrote to my dad and mum he would include a short note for me and sometimes he wrote to me with a short note for my parents. I eagerly awaited his letters.
Oman at that time was facing an oil boom and was one of the richest countries in the world. Following modernization by the then Sultan Qaboos, it was a liberal place to be. There were migrant workers from all over Africa, the Middle East - Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Sri Lanka to name a few.
And these migrant workers wrote home, and didn't use the dollar phone cards as they do now.
So when I requested my uncle for stamps he made a public request to the students in his class to gather any stamps they had at home and come to class with them; complete with instructions(which I had given him) on how to tear off the stamps from the cover without damaging them. I got a flood of stamps in each letter from my uncle after that. That made waiting for those letters from Oman all the more exciting notwithstanding the fact that a letter took one or one and a half month to reach either side, though air mail.
The remoteness of the village in Maharashtra where we stayed at that time must have added to the delay.
The process of communicating to and fro was painful but I would never swap that for the modern day social networking that caters to instant gratification and causes the addiction of the likes Facebook users report.

When the tweets never stopped.

This post is a trip down memory lane. And it might not be very accurate since it reminisces my childhood days and today I am much much older and might miss many of the beautiful things I might have noticed as a child.
The first thing that comes to my mind on my visits to my native Kerala these days is the change in the flora and fauna since my childhood days.
Not drastically but still quite subtle changes.
The weeds that lined the country roads then were some type of fern like plants that folded their leaves on touching them. We used to call them the "touch-me-not"s. I have never come across these plants lately.
The farmlands used to teem with insects and it was not rare to find a couple of scorpions hanging by their venomous tails, the sting being tied with a string to a banana shoot by some naughty schoolchild who didn't want to decimate the poor scorpion but neither let it escape his torment.
There were these huge centipedes that crawled anywhere and everywhere and which would curl into a spiral on physical contact, making them look like bulbous one rupee coins - the "atta". The roads teemed with them during the rainy season and vehicles and pedestrians using the road squashed them pretty hard. The scorpions are no longer to be seen (for the good?!), and neither these centipedes and millipedes.
If you dug the earth it would be impossible to go a few inches deeper into the earth before scooping up these giant earthworms. Earthworms, they say are good to keep the soil fertile - for vermi-compost. Now they use fertilizers in the tonnes. During the rainy season the rivulets sprang from springs that were almost perennial. No longer! Now the water table has sunk deep and to get water the year round you would need a very deep well. The streams are a once in a week affair that dry off soon after the rains.
I remember as a child we used to play a little game. When we visited our uncles and aunts in their houses in the vicinity we first checked the water wells. And since it was in the monsoons that we visited Kerala, the water table being quite high we could touch the water surface in the wells with our small hands. No longer. The water no longer comes to arm level now and the traditional mode of using bucket and rope is now replaced by motor pumps to reach the receding water table.
And the ants. I remember at least three varieties of ants - the big black ants, the small red ones - which you could never avoid getting bitten by if you used the small trails that crisscrossed the farms, and the smaller harmless ones that could be found all over the kitchen and store rooms.
And how cam I miss the sparrows? The chirps of the sparrows is now just a figment of memory - they are nowhere to be seen.
I remember one night, one of us kids had a cold and one electric light in the house was kept on in case of an emergency. I got up that night to a sight I have never seen before. The light in the room had attracted thousands of migratory locusts so thick that you would think there was snowfall. In suicide missions they rammed themselves against the light as their wings fell off and they lay twitching on the floor. Seems my grandfather was accustomed to this sight and he let loose the Alsatian dog we had and the two cats, and all the three pets had a sumptuous feast of butter soft locust meat.
I wonder whether we are actually changing the world around us in a time bracket of just quarter of a century? Traditionally cocoa, pepper, tapioca (kappa) and coffee were grown along with banana plantains in the midst of rubber trees. But now the cash crops are solely rubber, pineapple and vanilla. The rubber trees tend to draw a lot of ground water, the pineapple and vanilla in addition to the coconut trees, are protected by massive sprays of insecticides.
All these chemicals that we inject into the soil, are they changing the face of the earth? A point to ponder.