The pleasure of letter-writing

There used to be a time when having ‘pen-friends’ was a big deal. This was an era where there was no email or social media. It was all about letter writing and people stayed in touch via letters. It used to be a pleasure to read the long letters, so very descriptive and one could get updated with every single happening. Some were terse and up to the point. Essentially, apart from helping staying in touch, letters gave a peek into one’s personality – the length and the language of the letter conveyed so much.

Today, we have emoticons and most have lost the ability to articulate. Everything is short and terse, just like relationships too. Well, looks like 29-year old Rohini Kejriwal also had similar thoughts which is why in June she started a snail mail project – Chitthi Exchange.

This is something like a pen-friend where a person needs to signup and is then paired with another person. You need to fill in a form, answer few questions, which will help one gauge the kind of person he/she is, understand likes and dislikes, interests and that makes it easier to pair. Importantly, Rohini does all this manually, there is no app pairing you up based on some algorithm.

Once the pairs are made, Chitthi Exchange sends an e-mail with the name and address of the person you are paired with. The e-mail also has the steps that you need to follow. Thereafter it becomes a one-to-one correspondence between the pairs.

Rohini says that she has had people who have never ever written a letter in their life and do not even know the process of posting a letter, nothing about stamps and probably never visited a post office.

In these times of everything being instant and quick, this is a wonderful endeavor and hope more and people sign up at Chitthi Exchange.