“My Dearest Xxxxxxxxx,
First and
foremost, receive many greetings flowing like River Turkwel. Secondly, is to
know how you are faring on in this life. As for me, I am fine these sides of
ours. I received your letter and I read it four times to believe it was really
you. Even this morning I read it and it was as if you were really here with me.
How are the books treating you?.........”
The above is an excerpt from an actual letter I wrote
to my then girl friend when I was in form two. The name has been scrambled to
protect her identity (she is somebody’s spouse, and I am somebody else’s
spouse). This was more than 2 decades ago (Yes! I am that old, or “antiquated”,
as my 75 year old boss would put it). So much has changed since then.
Before I had a girl friend whom I had actually met, I
used to have pen pals. For those of you too young to understand what I’m
talking about, pen pals were the equivalent of today’s Facebook friends. We
used to put adverts in the newspapers (They had a Pen Pal section on Sundays).
The only way to send the request was through mail (Post Office Mail or Snail
Mail, as it has been derogatorily renamed) and it was also the only way to get response.
Writing a letter was serious business. No person worth his salt could write a letter and send it immediately. He first had to make a
rough draft, correct any grammatical errors and poor flow, then (and only then);
carefully rewrite the final draft. The final draft was usually written on
special paper from what were known as ‘writing pads’ (I don’t see them
anymore). These would be beautifully
designed with pictures of flowers or animals – Some were even scented! Any
letter written then can qualify to be a literature set piece today. It was
communication straight from the heart (and sweat).
Success cards appear to have stood the test of time as
I can still see them today. E-Cards however, seem to be taking the limelight
away. People are sending fewer and fewer cards through the post. I guess we
will soon stop seeing those beautiful (paper) cards of flowers and couples. I
still have one couples card which was sent to me by none other than – My Dad!
When I received it, I was very excited because I thought it was from a girl. I
was sorely disappointed to see the salutation, “Dear Son”. I don’t blame him
for bursting my bubble. He must have picked the card for the message which was
really nice, the ‘insignificant’ picture notwithstanding.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, very few people had
telephones installed in their houses especially in the rural areas where I
grew up. In my whole village for instance, there was only one home with a phone
and the owner was, thankfully, a family friend. My elder siblings went to
school in Meru where my father used to work and when he dispatched them home with a driver for the holidays, we would all
troop to the place with the phone to tell Dad they had arrived safely. I used
to look forward to the holidays, not to see my brother and sisters, but to talk
on the phone. I was one of the few boys in school who had not only seen a
phone, but actually used it.
When I got my first girl friend, who was more of a
pen pal because we rarely met in person, I was happy to know that they had a
phone at home. We had a telephone booth at school and I would save up my coins
to call her whenever they were at home and we were still at school. I remember
the queue that used to form outside the telephone booth at our school and at
all other booths which were common those days. I wonder what happened to those
beloved red booths and their voluminous directories.
When mobile phones first came, only a few select Kenyans
could afford to buy and run them. The first time I saw one, I was really
impressed. I couldn’t believe that a phone without a wire could really work. Looking
back now, I find it funny because that hand set was as big as a policeman’s
walkie-talkie. It could not fit in any pocket, and could stand unsupported on a
table.
A few years after the first mobile phone, everybody
could afford one. Now people could talk and SMS unhindered. With this
advancement in information technology, came the death of real communication.
Now people could replace “S” with “X” in their SMS’s and write the sort of
gibberish that can make a doctor’s prescription scrawling look like
calligraphy. Mobile phones now have cameras and internet and we can all log
into our favourite social media sites to post the photos of corpses at accident
scenes and videos of women being stripped naked as we stand by and do nothing.
I preferred the old layman’s way of being compassionate and saying what we felt instead of the present so called social media that is actually an “antisocial
media”.
P.S. I wish
Facebook could introduce the option of “Acknowledge” to the existing ones of “Like”,
“Comment”, and “Share”. I don’t want to have to click “Like” when someone says
he has lost a loved one and I don’t want to comment or share.
No comments:
Post a Comment