Can Thoughtful Writing Survive in the Modern Inbox?

I woke early this morning, tackled chores, brewed a cup of coffee, and settled in to check my emails. Anticipating the usual notifications from my bank, blog engagement data, or the weekly offers from Musafir or Emirates, I was caught off guard. Instead, I stumbled upon a digital relic—an authentic email, complete with structure, full sentences devoid of text abbreviations, proper syntax, and impeccable grammar. It was the whole shebang! Someone had actually written to me – instead of resorting to one of those impersonal Whatsapp messages that I usually read a day or two after they are sent! How cool, no?

Reading the email beckoned me to a time when the internet hummed at the pace of dial-up connections. A time when my communication with friends and family bore the weight of contemplation, when writing was an art, and was also my only way of connecting with friends from Mount Abu to Melbourne! (You know who you are)

As a student I was tethered to an hour of internet usage a day at home. Our egg white box computer sat on a Magenta table that was custom made to hide a printer, a bulky CPU, a noisy modem, and box speakers. We were all teched out in the early 2000s primarily thanks to my father’s foresight in recognizing the transformative impact of computers on the world; he wanted to ensure that we had the skills we would need in the future.

But one hour a day was never enough for me and so I found solace in cyber cafes, where for 10 rupees an hour I could navigate the fascinating virtual landscape, develop the grace of an Orkut maestro, stumble into strange chat rooms where people had even stranger user names and I would inevitably find myself hastily clicking the ‘x’ icon on a tab whenever a questionable advertisement or image popped up—usually just as the café owner was making his way down the aisle to ensure nobody was misusing the sacred machines. How times have changed, no?

Despite it all, nothing brought me more joy than spotting a familiar name in my inbox. Over the years, I transitioned from writing and sending letters to reading digital life updates, and both brought me immense joy. I have fond memories of walking to our neighborhood post office with grandma, queuing up to buy stamps, hunting for a glue stick and then finally slipping the envelopes into the slender mouths of big red letter boxes. Later, I made memories reading out emails to my folks, and printing out the ones I wanted to keep going back to after my time online was up. Email, once an art form, unfolded as a tapestry of my thoughts, meticulously woven in the quiet hum of a cyber café or against the background noise of a family of four in action.

Fast forward to the present, our corporate corridors reverberate with the staccato rhythm of mindless email culture, CCs, BCCs, instant messages, and WhatsApp pings—a cacophony that drowns the eloquence of artful communication. The digital realm, once my sanctuary for profound exchanges, now succumbs to the tyranny of brevity, FYIs, and is often used as a substitute for actual human to human communication.

In this era depth is sacrificed for immediacy and I yearn for a revival of the email’s grace. The corporate milieu, with its stilted language and curt directives, has eclipsed the nuanced beauty of written expression. People just don’t have the time to care for what they communicate.

If you’re reading this, I would ask you to reflect on the richness of what we’ve forsaken. The email, once a vessel for emotion and contemplation, has been long ignored. Can we not, in the midst of this digital deluge, salvage the sanctity of our written exchanges? As the festive season approaches with Christmas and New Year’s just around the bend, now is the ideal moment to delight someone with a heartfelt, personalized email message. Craft a note that goes beyond words, making them feel truly seen, warmly remembered, and genuinely cared for.

Can thoughtful writing survive in the modern inbox? I am going to try and reclaim the art of connection in the remaining ten days of 2023—one carefully crafted email at a time. Watch your inbox just in case you’re on my list.

Bringing Travel into the Classroom

This article was featured on the Innovate My School, UK website, August 2020.

I’ve always been obsessed with travelling. As a teenager I volunteered with my church group to traverse India working in villages, prisons, NGOs and hospitals. The experiences fulfilled me in ways I cannot fully explain and each year, I looked forward to doing more meaningful work and exploring my country every chance I got. As a young teacher some years later, I began organizing regular domestic travel for my students. I have such incredible memories of those early trips to forts and palaces in Southern India, ancient monuments hidden in mountains of the North and paragliding over sparkling waters in Goa. It’s quite possible that I had more fun than the kids on those journeys, but as I reflect on those experiences, I realize that they also allowed me the unique opportunity to see students developing an understanding of essential skills and it was pretty remarkable to me how a short break of eight or ten days could educate children in a way that classroom teaching never could. In fact, I am a firm believer that travel experiences can do more for character education and a sense of identity than any other experience in life can.

 

Over the last twelve years I have been to twenty-three countries and to simply say that travel changed me a little each time would be an understatement. Now, the philosophical world traveler in me feels the need to describe these moments as rich cultural experiences, but, truth be told, at first I was only interested in getting pictures for Facebook – the social and cultural education was a convenient bonus. Over the years, I have spent most of my time attempting to prepare children for life. I’ve learned from some incredible mentors, taken great courses, and had many professional development opportunities. Yet my travel experiences have taught me just as much and helped me become a better educator.

Shared-Learning

Sharing my travel stories with my students allows for intercultural understanding. It allows me to share my learning with them, inspiring and encouraging them to chase their passions and dreams. Personal travel stories allow me to address and hopefully debunk stereotypes, biases and presumptions towards cultures. They have the potential to awaken students to traditions and values of cultures, helping students recognise and value new ideas.

Making Sense of the Past 

I remember standing inside the cavernous hall of the Armenian Genocide Musuem in Yerevan and thinking to myself ‘Why didn’t we learn about this in school’? But when it comes to history, there are plenty of things we don’t know. More than a hundred years on, the impact of the Armenian genocide reverberates loud, and is echoed by the other atrocities that dot our social media feed daily. Too often despair stands in the way of action and knowledge leads to a sense of hopelessness. We cannot bring back to life the dead of the past or those who have been victims of political mass murder throughout the ages, but, through courage as well as knowledge, we can act to bring about a world free from the scourge of hatred. In committing ourselves to everyday things to create a world of peace, freedom, and mutual respect, we honor the memory of those who have fallen victim to the ultimate crimes. The genocide will soon turn 100, but the capacity to forgive is infinite. Mercy forsakes logic, math, numbers – I hope my students will always remember that.

Look Beyond the Textbooks

Some years ago, while travelling around Jordan, a friend arranged for me to spend 2 days at an orphanage school in Amman. The school was full of Syrian refugee kids trying to come to terms with their new circumstances. Recounting those experiences to my students, I realized that many of them admitted to knowing very little about the refugee crisis and the political landscape of the Arab countries. Before I began travelling, my Private School education too had actually taught me very little about it. Our curricula is sometimes so western-focused that we hardly really learn about the histories of people and nations in less developed parts of our planet.

I started this post thinking I would list ten ways in which travel helps me inspire my students, and I could go on listing my reflections; but I must keep my terminal verbosity at bay, so I’ll just leave you with some thoughts to consider with students in your classrooms.

• In a world that is constantly assaulting the senses, travel teaches young people the value of doing nothing and using time and space to unwind and make sense of their experiences
• The last twelve years has also cemented the idea that learning doesn’t end with a high school degree. In fact, graduating high school can be like baby steps – true education happens while you’re living and experiencing life in the real world
• Culture connects us all; despite having unique ways of experiencing the world, once you spend enough time with people you will realize that we have more shared humanity than we realize. The things that make us different, make us special, but the things which we share in common unite us too.
• Until I moved to the UAE, world travel seemed like a distant dream; the kind that sits at the back of your head, but you never give it any importance because you doubt it will happen for you. Over the last twelve years I have gained confidence in the idea that dreams are attainable if you work at them. I know that sounds cliché, but it is true, and when I tell that to my students, I believe it; because that has been my own experience.

So there you have it, if I were to sum up everything that I am feeling as I type this, I would say that sharing my travel experiences with my students has helped me create a safe zone for learning about life. Students are always interested to know about their teachers’ personal lives and sharing my travel experiences with them helps me intersect the personal with the profound in a way that subject content might never be able to.

I hope that each of my students can have some degree of world travel experience. When I started wandering and wondering, I discovered things about the world I had not known before and through it, I discovered who I was. I hope they too have the wonderful opportunity to discover themselves and the history of shared humanity through the joys of travel.

Caught in The Web

 

I first met Rituparna Mahapatra some years ago and got to know her better through her writing which has now found a new home on her blog. Since then, I have been waiting to get her to write for ‘Frankly Speaking’. Rituparna is at present, editor-at -large for Kitaab.org. Her features have been published in India America Today, The Deccan Herald, The Telegraph, Borderless Journal and Odisha bytes amongst others. She taught English literature at Sambalpur and Delhi Universities before she became a full time writer; today she continues to teach writing in her free time. Rituparna lives in Dubai, with her husband, two kids and her golden retriever Hiro.

On checking the data for my phone’s screen time usage, it says 8 hours (in the last week?). I am perplexed as to how this can be; I hardly get time to breathe these days. But my phone clears all the dark clouds and shows me the time I have spent on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, chatting, reading, writing and browsing online. The data is out there, broken down to its tiniest measure of time and everything is crystal clear. I stare at the screen for a while – this is a revelation to me ‘about me’.

I have never known the insides of my mind, as well as my phone, does. It’s as if this 6 by 2.5 inch piece of living metal knows what I am looking at, what my desires are, the people I dislike, the ones I love, my happiest place, my darkest fears; all of it. It knows about the diseases I suffer from, my ovulation cycle and my mood swings. Eerie.

It seems like we have forgotten to feel our emotions without documenting them. Our date nights are spent clicking pictures of the flowers on the table to the food on our plates and sending it out there. Yes, we hold hands and smile but only to keep a record. Memories are not made anymore, we just store them to never visit again; unless Facebook reminds us.  Imagine everything ‘about us’ being out there, whirring in the universe of a never-forgetting web. Everything that we have ever done virtually is archived somewhere. Our private chats, our photos, our google searches, our 4:00 am calls, our food preferences, our favourite celebrities, our secret accounts, who we have muted, who we have blocked, who we are stalking…Every. Single. Thing.

I secretly envisage the threat this carries – of exposing us, our real selves.  This unravelling of our lives, layer by layer, stripping it of any vanity that we may have proclaimed, bringing our perfect lives to dust. To make matters worse, as I was thinking this, my Instagram flashed pictures of ‘Electric Kettles ‘ directing me towards stores selling them. How did ‘they’ know I needed one? Then I remembered that when my kettle crashed yesterday I searched frantically for a replacement on Google. I forgot about it soon after, but my phone remembered.

Maybe this is a millennial delusion, a picture of a dystopian world, all of which is a result of living in continuous surveillance of the ‘web’. I type ‘how’ and the search engine throws up ‘how to speak with more confidence’; mocking me, showing me my deepest fears; which I have guarded diligently and prefer to battle on my own through dark, sleepless nights. I don’t want to be reminded of it now; when I am with my friends sipping iced tea at the cafe and planning on our next trip to the organic store that sells the best ‘truffles’. By the way, I was searching for ‘how to cook with truffles’ too.

I cannot touch my teenager’s phone anymore; the biometrics inform him every time it is touched by anyone other than him. Since then, I have added another prayer-point to my list, ‘to keep him protected from the web always’. I worry for my younger one too so now I insist on surveying the faces and lives of her virtual friends. I feel guilty about stalking them, but I do it nevertheless. The fear of ‘the unknown’ that our children are exposed to and what they are becoming is far greater than everything else.

Our parents are not safe either. There are stories I read every day of senior citizens being robbed of their hard-earned savings. I call my mother hurriedly and ask her to wait till she can go in person to the bank. She tells me, our small town is tense with an underlying threat of simmering mob violence, between two religious sects. I ask how will they know ‘who’ is ‘who’? She reminds me of the details they had filled up on the digital voter card; they know exactly ‘who’ is ‘who’. They know how many people live in each house, how much they earn and how much they spend, which places they visit, thanks to the online check-ins. My belief that God controls everything is shaken, our lives are flow charts for programming codes, in the end, we are just data to an algorithm.

This Pandemic has been a wake-up call for us on many fronts. It has brought out the lies, deceits, greed, the corruption of governments, the breakdown of societies, the evils of systems. It has shown us the fragility of the human mind; how it can crumble despite our best efforts and how relationships can break at the slightest provocation. It has taught us that there is always a possibility of hiding behind ‘Incognito’ mode, and pretend that all is well

Maybe the internet emerged as a coping tool for all this chaos; a safe place for each one of us, initially. One that seemed non-judgmental, comforting and sensitive. You could speak more freely here, explore fearlessly; unmindful that it was using every byte of your mind to build its kingdom. Spinning its web. What began with awe and allure of a simple ‘Mario’ or ‘Temple run’ game, has taken demonic proportions. Have we given too much of ourselves to this internet by clicking on too many ‘ I agree’ buttons without reading? Have we offloaded too much personal data into it.? We live a different life online.  Is it only a matter of time before we are forced to bear the brunt of living in this binary existence?

As I write this, my ‘Healthify’ app reminds me that I am just one cup away from consuming my optimal ‘water intake’ for the day. It gives me the option of drinking chamomile tea instead of water, promising a good night’s sleep. I click on the teacup image and google for the best organic chamomile tea even though I know I should delete that app and go out for a walk, to get a goodnight’s sleep.

Soon, hopefully very soon.