Opinion: Importance of sending letters

Dear Shivam,

The Problem:

I wish you are healthy and fine. Over these years I’ve felt your presence as the most yielding one. I feel a growth. I remember the point our interests met each other. The days in the school library when we would discuss over random words from The Penguin Dictionary of Physics to the present day when we recently discussed vector fields. The journey is, no doubt, lovely, promising, and high yielding. But I’ve always had a sense of perforation, some lack of organization in the journey so far. Of course, we talk over the phone and often chat these days but there is a sense of void. The ideas we communicated, discussed, debated lacked vividness.

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An alternative:

Books survive because they are a quantized-cum-organized piece of work. Letters are so as well. They are also reflections of ones’ mind. From private letters, where thought flows freely, we can study the growth and development of a person’s mind and the inner history of his being. It is for this reason that the private letters of many public men are so much in demand.

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Why an Essays? :

In Prof. Dawkins’ Autobiography, I read about the ritual of essay writing at Oxford. It felt weird as I read it for the first time that most celebrated research universities and colleges around the planet employ their students to write essays on, say, linear algebra or kidney’s ultra-filtration or nucleophilic substitution reaction or Stephen Boltzmann Law (you name it). In India, people solve numerical problems and MCQs to pass their examinations. In contrast to the Indian method of education, I see vitality in essay writing. It demands your effort in a different way. Moreover, where the Indian method provides fluency, the framing of an essay provides a platform to rethink and organize your ideas. Fluency comes as a byproduct of this process. It is a kind of gamble: in the race of proving your intellectuality, you look back over what you were taught, pay frequent visits to the library, think about the way you’ll present your idea in the essay to give a smooth flow to the reader, ask the right question in the right context, and most importantly, strive to produce original ideas to easily secure first rank.

At the end of your undergraduate years, you realize all your essays are crying to be published in form of one or more volumes.

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Pseudo-bonds, Impulsivity, and Disorganization in People:

Today when I see the ease that communication technologies have inserted into the fabric of the society, I feel, both, incredible and nervous.

Incredible because today we have something no one in the past even thought would exist. The world is moving in speed because the time lag in communication has vanished. My Dad survived a dozen times in road accidents hundred kilometers away because he had a cell phone.

On the other hand, I feel nervous because the deep emotions, the Mecca of a relationship, is now replaced by WhatsApp forwards.  Apart from the impulsivity (which is establishing its concrete structure in people’s head), instant communication has destroyed the sense of permanence and value in messages.

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” – Anonymous

I have few books: a collection of letters of some celebrated people. When I read through their messages, sometimes they move me to tears and quite often strike my dlPFC. Mom has a short collection of reply letters. Believe me or not, they were unspeakably marvelous memoranda of values. But today, those same relatives talk via voice or chatting applications. They, most probably, collectively forward a message on a festivity, and yeah you guessed it right, these messages are to fill the quota. The sense of closeness these days has almost destroyed the bond between our two families. We hardly talk.

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The Bottom Line:

So the bottom line is, yeah, technology has reduced distances. But it has also corrupted those distances. People don’t give a thought about the things they say or believe in. They live mindlessly and act impulsively. The absence of giving a thought about something has facilitated the creation of disorganized ideas and beliefs. And this turns out to be one of the crucial reasons for the mess on the planet.

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The proposal:

Here I propose an idea. I think you can smell it. 

For the betterment of our intellectual growth, 

to strengthen proper communication of ideas, 

for creating a collection of ideas for a future revisit, 

to plant a sapling of an organized set of ideas, 

I propose that we both (regardless of normal talks) write to each other through email service once a week.

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How will it work? :

Daily we can reflect and write something (long or short), can cite textbooks and nonfictions and talks and articles and on the weekends, say on Sundays, inbox week’s work to each other. The thoughtful framing of something like essays will, definitely, wand a hue on our minds.

Moreover, we can employ the Scientific Method systematically and learn limitlessly. In addition to that, there will be an academic benefit, thanks to the Feynman technique. Study as if you were to teach this to somebody else: this is the Feynman technique.

You told me once that you wanted to immerse yourself in your medical studies. Now, that is possible when you are always engaged with it. This plan will ensure that apart from making your assignments and chasing your grades, you’ll be engaged in thinking something deep, something original - to archive it as well as impress me. The effort while giving words to your ideas won’t bother you. Your organized ideas will always be. We can print them periodically (say, four times a year or something like that).

I have realized that when I sit somewhere to merely ‘think’, I am often distracted by momentary happenings. In contrast, when I carry my laptop to my lawn or somewhere alone to write my ideas down, I often end up with something like this message. Valuable and will exist even if I stopped thinking about it!

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Long term benefits:

We both have ideas in our heads but only a few of them are interrelated in a pattern. Once in a pattern, they are easy to present and develop further. Moreover, letters have the power to move and strike.

This plan -

Benefits: we’re engaged, thoughtful, original, organized, archived, (and perhaps) game changer.

Loss: (Can you tell me of one?)

I think spending some time working on our ideas is far more yielding than hanging out with a gang. So, I don’t see harms in this plan.

If you like this proposal, we can begin. If not, nevermind! We can still survive.

Yours Loving,

Shivam