On the cards

Last week Bunny and I were pleased as punch when our friends from the UK, Karan and Surbhi, and Roopa and Dan, unexpectedly dropped in to wish us a happy New Year. What with the many travel restrictions in place, they didn’t come by in person but did so by proxy, in the form of proper, old-fashioned greeting cards. Thanks to the internet, paper greeting cards which were delivered by post have become as outmoded as black-and-white television sets and manual typewriters, and have been replaced by ecards, and email messages. This is all to the good, environmentally speaking. Unlike paper cards, ecards and emails don’t require trees to be cut to make paper on which to print them, nor do they leave a carbon footprint the way postal services do. But traditional snail-mail cards, whether they’re for New Year, or Christmas, or Diwali, or for birthdays and other anniversaries, or for any other celebration, convey a sense of occasion, an immediacy of contact, which electronic felicitations lack, even when they’re accompanied by animated pictures or videos. The reason for this is that ecards and emails can, at the click of a button, be sent to any number of recipients, and in that sense are impersonal. A greeting card, delivered by courier or postman, is singularly personalised, meant for you, and only you. It is also personalised in that it bears the handwriting of the sender, and the person’s signed name. While our features change with time and age, after maturity our writing remains much the same, as distinctive and identifiable as our voice. When we read the handwriting of someone we know well, it’s as though the person is speaking to us, the familiar voice coming to us not through a telephone but through the inbuilt receiver in our mind, called memory. The greetings we get on paper have a long shelf life, literally. I display them on the sideboard in our living room, where they remain undisturbed for days, sometimes weeks, reluctant as I am to part with them, and by doing so dispel the aura of festive cheer and goodwill that surrounds them.