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.