Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 26 February 2018 | Page 39

NED TAKE ON LOVE
letter-writing ritual, relationships leave behind the power and poetics of memory
Photographs: ALAMY
anecdotes. Carnegie turned such folklore into the
makings of a science. A whole generation used
How to Make Friends and Influence People as a
Bible, for managing everydayness, and Carnegie
was as famous as management experts like Frank
Gilbreth or Peter Drucker. All of them brought a
folksy quality to the science they were busy
inventing. Such books did play a crucial role in
migrant societies where new entrants had to
master the rules of the game, from table manners
to the new rituals of relationships.
Here relationship was seen as oral, face-to-face
and immediate. The rise of print added a romantic
quality to it through the cult of letter writing.
Letter writing is a form few in the world of internet
can understand. A letter evoked memory, sum-
THEN/NOW From the time of Kalidasa’s
Shakuntalam to the age of the internet,
relationships have travelled a few lightyears
A love letter
conveyed
loss or the
ecstasy of
sharing in a
tropicality
of emotion
today’s
telegraphic
lines can’t.
moned the nuances of language, was candid about
emotion, privacy, secrecy, and allowed for a differ-
ent culture of time. A love letter in that sense was a
monument to the everydayness of relationship,
where loss, absence, the ecstasy of sharing were
conveyed in a tropicality of emotion that today’s
telegraphic sentences never could. Letters con-
veyed emotions a selfie could never dream of and
they had a shelf life. One cherished them and they
were written for the future. They evoked duration,
belonged to a time whose depth, nuance and emo-
tion we have lost in the flatland of the internet. A
26 February 2018 OUTLOOK 39