Of phone calls, letters, telegrams and radios

Development in telecommunications, the evolution of internet and mobile phones has brought the world close. A lot close. Friends and family with whom you had trouble keeping in touch are now in touch with you everyday and sometimes multiple times in a day.

But what this age doesn't provide is the romance and magic of waiting and unknown. My father had a transferable job. Which meant we traveled a lot. Also our relatives lived in different cities. So, I had cousins and friends, growing up in diverse cultures in different parts of the country. I would want to know about them and the places where they were living in, but communicating with them was difficult.

To talk to someone in a different city, we had to place a trunk call. Placing the trunk call was a tedious task - because we needed to wait for ages, before the request for our call was taken and then delivered. Each call costed between Rs. 7 to Rs. 20 per minute (the value of Rs. 20 those days was much higher than what it is today) and hence we had to keep the messages on the call short and crisp. I remember, once when I had got a chance to speak to a dear cousin of mine, she had said in a whisper, (lest parents could hear what she was saying) "Veenakka, I have something to tell you... I will write a letter..."

I had waited in anticipation for ten days before the letter had come. But then that was the magic of letters. We would write long letters to our friends and cousins sharing with them the joys and pains of growing up. I remember coming from school and waiting on the porch for the afternoon postman to deliver our letters at 3 pm. When one of my friends had shifted to a hostel, both of us would write to each other every once in two days. This pattern had continued till she had made new friends in the hostel and got adjusted to the new life. With the advent of commercial airlines, letters within India would get delivered within three days. And if there were messages to be delivered faster than that, there was always the telegram.

On most days, telegrams meant bad news. I remember the time when the telegram had brought in the news of my paternal grandfather's death. The picture of my mother sitting distressed, with the telegram in one hand and tears flowing down her cheeks is still very vivid in my mind.

Talking about death, we had heard the news about the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination on the big black radio box. Listening to the radio was a delight. We would tune in to vivid bharati and love to hear the clear, husky voice of the male radio presenter, or the bubbly, lively voice of the female presenter, taking us on a journey of music and movies. There were only a select few who held the coveted position of being a RJ (radio jockey). Hence very few had the privilege and responsibility of reaching out to the masses. We waited to hear that voice everyday and yearned to know the person behind the voice.

Those days had a magic of unknown, a joy in the anxious waiting, that I guess, today's "google and cell phone" world will find very difficult to understand.