It is almost a month past Christmas and New Year but the memories of what I used to do during this time of the year, while I was growing up, are still fresh. I used to eagerly await the Christmas holidays scheduled after the 2nd term exams, which would get over in the 1st week of December. The 2nd week of December was spent in singing carols and preparing for those exciting Christmas class parties for which each one of us had to wear color dress to school. (I used to decide my dress 2 weeks ahead of the party :) ) After this, the school would declare a 3 weeks break for Christmas and New Year.
My mother believed in sending greeting cards to all her friends and relatives and I used to play an important role in executing this task of hers. I used to accompany her to the greeting card store and help her select cards. I slowly learnt the importance of choosing cards that we could relate to. We used to get a set of seasons greetings to be sent to people who shared a formal relation with my parents, one set of cards for their friends , a different set for the relatives and a couple of special cards , selected solely by me, for my friends. At home, I used to take up the responsibility of filling in whatever little I could in these cards. Most of the time, I would fill up the empty space with lines borrowed from other cards and decorate the remaining space with smiley, hearts and animations of different sizes and colors. Later on, I replaced my version of comic sans font with the calligraphy writing I was taught at school to fill up the empty space. To my friends, I used to write a long letter and send it along with the card. While mom would write the addresses of all her friends, relatives and colleagues, I would do this on my own for the ones meant for my friends. It used to give me great pleasure to write our names (Dad, Mom, Bro and mine) in the “Loads of luv” section and to leave the note “Open with a great smile :)” that could be seen as one opened the envelope to pull out the card.
The activity of sending cards would nearly last a week or two and my biggest motivation to be a part of it was to win words of appreciation from my parents. It is amazing how parents can make you feel like the best person to be ever born. Every time they said something good about my creativity (sometimes I wasn’t even creative), I used to dismiss it with a “It was a piece of cake... I could have done much better if I wanted to...” but deep within, I used to cherish every single word that made me feel special and important.
I used to also look forward to receiving cards sent by the others and would decorate the living room and my room with a whole lot of these and would also look for any bright ideas that I could incorporate in the next season.
This slowly started fading away with the advent of computers and Internet in our lives. Greeting cards were slowly replaced by e-cards and e-mails and I used to still be a part of sending them in the early days.
This again slowly began to fade with the numerous forwards that are exchanged via mails and SMSes. I have about thousand unread forwards in my inbox and e-cards might just be a part of them. I lost the importance of sending e-cards just like how I lost the importance of sending forwards. Surely technology has shrunk the world to an unimaginable extent and staying connected has never been easier. But this has also led me into thinking that the people I want to be in touch with are just a click away or a phone call away and I can do it anytime I want to. Days, months and years go by in pretending to be busy and then it just feels weird to be writing and calling the same people whom at some point I was dying to be in touch with. I don’t know if it is right to blame technology for it (because I know it is entirely my fault and I can still do something about it) but somehow doing so makes me feel a little better because without it I probably would have still continued sending those cards to everyone I know, instead of quietly thinking about people and wishing them in my mind. I certainly long for those days and I hope to revive them soon. Till then, the lazy part of me ( I don’t know if any other part of me even exists! :D) will continue to blame myself and technology…
P.S: I take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy New Year!! I'm guessing it’s a little too late to wish Merry Christmas, but I’m hoping everyone had a good time :)
My mother believed in sending greeting cards to all her friends and relatives and I used to play an important role in executing this task of hers. I used to accompany her to the greeting card store and help her select cards. I slowly learnt the importance of choosing cards that we could relate to. We used to get a set of seasons greetings to be sent to people who shared a formal relation with my parents, one set of cards for their friends , a different set for the relatives and a couple of special cards , selected solely by me, for my friends. At home, I used to take up the responsibility of filling in whatever little I could in these cards. Most of the time, I would fill up the empty space with lines borrowed from other cards and decorate the remaining space with smiley, hearts and animations of different sizes and colors. Later on, I replaced my version of comic sans font with the calligraphy writing I was taught at school to fill up the empty space. To my friends, I used to write a long letter and send it along with the card. While mom would write the addresses of all her friends, relatives and colleagues, I would do this on my own for the ones meant for my friends. It used to give me great pleasure to write our names (Dad, Mom, Bro and mine) in the “Loads of luv” section and to leave the note “Open with a great smile :)” that could be seen as one opened the envelope to pull out the card.
The activity of sending cards would nearly last a week or two and my biggest motivation to be a part of it was to win words of appreciation from my parents. It is amazing how parents can make you feel like the best person to be ever born. Every time they said something good about my creativity (sometimes I wasn’t even creative), I used to dismiss it with a “It was a piece of cake... I could have done much better if I wanted to...” but deep within, I used to cherish every single word that made me feel special and important.
I used to also look forward to receiving cards sent by the others and would decorate the living room and my room with a whole lot of these and would also look for any bright ideas that I could incorporate in the next season.
This slowly started fading away with the advent of computers and Internet in our lives. Greeting cards were slowly replaced by e-cards and e-mails and I used to still be a part of sending them in the early days.
This again slowly began to fade with the numerous forwards that are exchanged via mails and SMSes. I have about thousand unread forwards in my inbox and e-cards might just be a part of them. I lost the importance of sending e-cards just like how I lost the importance of sending forwards. Surely technology has shrunk the world to an unimaginable extent and staying connected has never been easier. But this has also led me into thinking that the people I want to be in touch with are just a click away or a phone call away and I can do it anytime I want to. Days, months and years go by in pretending to be busy and then it just feels weird to be writing and calling the same people whom at some point I was dying to be in touch with. I don’t know if it is right to blame technology for it (because I know it is entirely my fault and I can still do something about it) but somehow doing so makes me feel a little better because without it I probably would have still continued sending those cards to everyone I know, instead of quietly thinking about people and wishing them in my mind. I certainly long for those days and I hope to revive them soon. Till then, the lazy part of me ( I don’t know if any other part of me even exists! :D) will continue to blame myself and technology…
P.S: I take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy New Year!! I'm guessing it’s a little too late to wish Merry Christmas, but I’m hoping everyone had a good time :)
4 comments:
Sangi-san... Wish you a very Happy New Year, and a Belated Happy Cristmas and Sankranti aswell..
Keep Blogging!!! :)
Thanks Rajeev! :)
Its been long...
The advent of computers and internet means that you have to keep blogging? Probably yes just bcoz the world is reading :)
Hi ,
I was reading ur blog posts and found some of them to be very good.. u write well.. Why don't you popularize it more.. ur posts on ur blog ‘sangi days’ took my particular attention as some of them are interesting topics of mine too;
BTW I help out some ex-IIMA guys who with another batch mate run www.rambhai.com where you can post links to your most loved blog-posts. Rambhai was the chaiwala at IIMA and it is a site where users can themselves share links to blog posts etc and other can find and vote on them. The best make it to the homepage!
This way you can reach out to rambhai readers some of whom could become your ardent fans.. who knows.. :)
Cheers,
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