Friendship's Day 2023: How these Mumbaikars are writing letters unconventionally to engage with pen pals

Minal Bhatia was a teenager when she was first introduced to the concept of writing letters, which she used to write to exchange students, who were known to her. In the 80s, Bhatia had a lot of pen pals and she would send letters to people all over the world. "Since my grandfather was a member of many international associations like the Indo-Japanese Centre and was also a Rotaract member, a lot of foreign students would come to our house. I used to write letters to them as a child."

While it was a very enriching exercise for Bhatia then, it fizzled off once life happened. But as life happened, the former teacher got to reconnect with that side of her in the last two years, after more than 30 years. Today, she regularly writes to many friends, who are not only from India but different parts of the world. It is an activity that she truly enjoys in this digital age.

Every year, International Friendship's Day is celebrated on July 30, but in India, we celebrate it on the first Sunday of August, i.e. August 6, this year. Traditionally, children and teenagers tie different coloured friendship bands on each other's hands and even spend time with each other to celebrate their bond of friendship. Adults, on the other hand, go out for lunch or dinner and engage in different kinds of activities. One cannot ignore how the medium of making friends has changed. While earlier it was in person, the digital age has completely changed that as many people meet each other online and become friends with each other. It is far from the time when friends wrote letters to each other that didn't end in two sentences but would be two pages long.

Discovering pen pals
While that now seems like aeons ago, interestingly, there are some who have rediscovered writing letters to each other or rather becoming pen pals, and are enjoying every bit of it. Mid-day spoke to some of these Mumbaikars including Bhatia, who have been actively writing letters to people from all over the world.

Bhatia, inspired by Instagram's MinizPostcards, joined Postcrossing to connect with pen pals globally, exchanging letters and postcards. She finds the act therapeutic and enjoys learning about others' lives. She explains, "I was going through Instagram when I came across MinizPostcards on Instagram, where they send letters and got to know about a workshop happening at the Asiatic Library. I met the whole community in Mumbai, which shares postcards and stamps with each other."

After this, there was no looking back for Bhatia, who closely kept an eye on how people were writing and how they do it. It was on this journey when somebody shared a hashtag of Postcrosser that she discovered Postcrossing, a website that allows people to become pen pals. She immediately registered and started sending letters to people. While she initially sent it through the group she met in Mumbai, she took it upon herself to do it from start to finish and hasn't stopped since then. Through this, Bhatia learned the meaning of ‘stamping'. On the Postcrossing website, one has to mention their likes, dislikes, hobbies and any other interesting detail about themselves. "You can mention what you want to know from other people. For example, if you want to learn languages, you can mention please let me know about your dialects." Over the last one year, Bhatia has written to many interesting people including a 16-year-old, 50-year-old cancer survivor, a 70-year-old couple travelling the world and others who can't see the world. "I am more of a letter writer. There are others who only write postcards and then there are people who write both." She clears the difference, "Since I like to connect with people, so, I tell them I will write a letter, you can send me whatever you want - either a letter or a postcard."

Every Postcrosser is assigned six people at a time and every person has an ID. Once a person sends the letter, they have to mention the ID on the envelope and in the letter, and then go to the website and send a picture of the letter. When the person receives the letter, they reply saying they have received the letter. After she finishes writing to the six, she will be assigned another six.

She explains, "Writing letters is therapeutic. When I write letters, I write about everything - what I used to do, what I am doing right now - a little bit of everything, because I want people to open up. I am 50 now and I am not going to be able to roam the world. The only thing I can do is talk to people and open up and only then will they share their lives." Through this very experience, Bhatia has observed that earlier people used to share things with each other about everything but now everything is business-like and always on Instagram. Today, she spends roughly Rs 20 - Rs 35 to send a letter abroad. While sending these letters, Bhatia adds a touch of her own by sending them maps and booklets of Mumbai or India, which she has collected over the years, in the form of a postcard.

Over the last year, she has formed a routine. Once Bhatia receives the postcard, she sits down and reads it, and then thinks about what she wants to share with them. Then, when she is writing, she keeps the letter at hand to refer to it and reply accordingly. "When I started, I used to write a lot of poems. Since it is an outlet, I used to write poems and since I love art and craft I used to send all of it to them, made from newspaper cuttings," she adds. She has even taken it a step further and installed a post box near her homestay in Lonavala, and encourages school-going children to post letters.

Making pen-pals digitally
Elsewhere in the city, Srushti Bhakare has always known about the concept of pen pals, but it took the Covid-19 pandemic to push her towards exploring the medium. She explains, "I connected with my pen pals during the first year of the pandemic in 2020 When everything was switching to the mercy of the internet." Four years later, the Gen-Z digital marketing professional is very close to these very friends, and now shares the happenings in daily life with them too.

Interestingly, the 22-year-old Bhakare did not become pen pals with her friends through the traditional method of writing letters, but through an application called ‘Slowly', which "lets you meet pen pals from your smartphone", according to the description on the website. Users can write letters to their newly made friends on the application, which depicts it like a real letter; users can also collect stamps. "I discovered the app through my sibling, who also uses it. It helps you connect with people globally. You can choose whom to befriend based on their likings and interests. The app pretty much works like how we share letters in real life. It takes a couple of hours to days, depending on the distance between the pen pals."

Bhakare's elder sister Shraddha Bhakare, joined the application two years prior in 2018 and connected with her pen pals. "My pen pal reached out to me because we shared similar interests," shares 26-year-old Bhakare.

While she hasn't written letters as pen pals, she likes the whole process of doing it online because of the app's feature where it took a few hours to deliver your responses to the other person - like how a letter works. She shares, "In a fast-paced world, it gave me a glimpse of how people used to communicate before technology reduced the waiting time. So I think that was the fascinating experience, waiting to see what they had to say." Unfortunately, the Mumbaikar has lost touch with her pen pal now but hopes to connect with them again. "Our shared interests mostly allowed us to have a nice conversation which made it easier to relate to them even though they were from a different country," she reminisces.

In the last few years, the Bhakare sisters have shared letters with their pen pals almost every other day giving a regular update on each other's lives. She shares, "They would send me pictures of the pets and the nature around them, and as someone who gets excited about animals and plants, it was the most exciting part for me. As the lockdown was slowly lifted globally, and in their countries, they would go on outings, and we would exchange pictures of all the post-lockdown trips that we did."

Currently, younger Bhakare is still connected to two of these friends, Dino and Lulla, who go by their pen names on the application, and hail from different countries in Asia. "They would describe their trips in detail with pictures of them and their families. It was a new experience for me altogether to be friends with someone you have never met in real life. Even after so many years of being in touch, it amuses me that we have shared the deepest details of our lives and feelings but never actually heard each other's voices. I guess that's the beauty of having pen pals," she shares happily.

Over time, as life got back to normal and really busy, the Mumbaikar admits that writing letters got tiring, so they decided to resort to something quicker and easier, and that's why they resorted to Instagram. "We frequently chat and catch up in our DMs," she concludes.

Also Read: Friendship Day 2023: Experts share tips to nurture your friendships amidst busy lives