Letters

I get plenty of emails daily.
I miss letters.
Everybody seems to know my email address but I think if someone has to send me some letter or parcel, he will first call me to know my postal address.

There is a constant pressure to keep up the pace with technology. More so when your work involves technology or you make a living out of it.  If you are not aware of a new smartphone launch in USA on the very next day, you can be comfortably labeled as a layman - which is becoming a derogatory word. Though one was supposed to sleep in India while the launch was taking place in USA. With every new innovation, technology wipes out things from environment or culture. It makes them redundant.

Email is one such product of this fertile specie called technology that has brought a paradigm shift and has made so many things obsolete. Letters written in hand are its biggest causality. Emails don't have a handwriting, they just have fonts. A neat and beautiful handwriting was definitely a impressive skill. No one cares now. Indian post office has lost his daily load of those yellow cards and thin blue papers which were once precious to keep life going.

Emails are fast and make business so effective but somehow I think they fail to strike a personal note. A letter of appreciation written in hand seems more valuable than an email. In schools we were taught letter-writing. The teachers worked hard to teach basics of letter writing such as to always have a subject in business letter and so on. Emails are smart enough to remind us that we have not written a subject if we try to send it without one. Aren't we becoming dumb by relying more on software ? Technology also contribute to generation gap. Parents find it difficult to adopt email and children consider letters not in vogue.

Humans like to create more choice and make their life difficult by picking among those choices. Technology is helping creating those choices. Many a times we say, "It was better when there was only one TV channel- Doordarshan. Now it is only about changing channels through remote and watching nothing effectively". However, this will continue. Humans embrace change brought in by themselves.May be in few decades email will get extinct too. Who knows ?

Technology can make you feel happy but if nostalgia strikes you often, technology can make you sad.