This World Letter Writing Day, we revisit the deeply personal world of handwritten letters. Treasured keepsakes that made every note more than just words on a page.

The days of the past seem simpler. They were a crossroads between technological revolutions and the old-school mode of communication. And in the middle of all this was our one innate desire to communicate, and what better way to do so than through letters! They were more like folds of emotions than paper, and if the note just happened to be a love letter, the feelings overflowed.

“I remember my first love letter written to a classmate in first-year medical school. I went to great lengths to collect parchment from a store in New Market, poured my feelings onto the piece of paper, rolled it, inserted it into a glass bottle, and handed it to her. Needless to say, she was not expecting this — this ‘message in a bottle!’  And it worked,” said Muad, 45.

For those in their mid-40s now, stories like that may seem familiar.

“I was in university in the early 2000s, and letters, by then, had become ceremonial”, said Tasbir, now in his mid-40s. “We were engrossed in the idea of e-mails. However, unlike the younger generation of today, people still understood the importance and cherished the sentiment behind a written letter.”

People used to go to great lengths to pen letters to their lovers, and the purpose was always to impress them.

Tasbir continued, “My handwriting was terrible. I used to dictate my letters to a friend of mine, and she would laughingly write them in her crisp handwriting. Some 30 years later, that scribe is now my wife of 24 years. Wonder what happened to the girl in the red saree to whom all those romantic words were written for.”

Not everyone was a gifted writer, and people manoeuvred their way through the obstacle. It may be impossible to believe that there were cheap books sold on the pavements on “How to Write a Love Letter.”

I have no idea how well they were received by readers, or whether the tips offered in the cut-rate book with red newspaper covers worked. Some were plagiarised, to say the least, in their effort to win hearts.

“When I was in high school, I met a shy person who was not very expressive. And boy could he write! He would send me scribbled notes in school and later in college — beautiful poems, sometimes even sonnets. Years later, as I grew up, I realised much of the content was taken verbatim from great poets and songwriters,” laughed Priota, now a school teacher.

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“However, credit should be where credit is due; every letter he ever sent was so relevant, I now pause in wonder thinking how immensely well-read and musically tuned he must have been,” she adds.

People not only cherished love letters; some preserved them, sometimes at considerable risk of being discovered.

Sheela, now in her late fifties, still has her letters neatly stored in a jolly tin box.

“It’s not like I read them for pleasure, but I have them in my possession. I dreamt of reading them to my grandchildren when they come of age, but they are now too busy with their lives,” she said.

“Probably busy writing Insta messages to their loved one as we speak,” she changed the mood with a smile.

In our more conservative social setting, however, posting a love letter could be a risky proposition. Lovers often devised their own routes of delivery.

Muad recalled, “I was the ‘messenger boy’ of a romantic relationship involving my cousin sister in the late ‘80s. She was madly in love with my private tutor. Every day, Ali Bhai would slip a note in a novella, and it was my duty to hand over the book to my sister. Days later, the tome would be returned, with a neatly written reply. I was paid in chocolates and trips to ice-cream parlours for my hard work.

“One day, I was not able to memorise a poem, and my teacher gave me a beating. Out of spite, I did not deliver letters for a week or so, stored them, and handed them over to my Fupu!”

Years later, I now feel that they both genuinely loved each other. My cousin moved on, and so did the teacher, I believe.

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It was not necessary that all love letters would solely address matters of love. A correspondence by my maternal grandfather, written from Calcutta probably during the great riots, remains a witness to a turbulent time when he missed his family and his child.

The letter had references to love, politics, and the sad realities of life. Decades later, it has become more than a family keepsake; it is a small document of a turbulent time, and perhaps that is what makes it one of my most cherished possessions.

The expression of love has never been simple, and perhaps one of the most enduring ways to express it has always been through words. The medium may have changed, but the urge to reach someone and impress them remains the same.

Whether the distance was geographical or social, in the past there was space between the writer and the recipient. And love letters offered something ordinary conversation could not. On paper, people could say things they struggled to say aloud. Someone shy could become eloquent. A person could pause, rethink, cross something out and begin again.

Today, much of that distance has disappeared. We are constantly connected, and love has found its way into bite-sized messages and shared reels. Even the words themselves can now be generated by machines. But if a machine can write the “perfect” love letter, what happens to the imperfections that once made these letters intimate?

Thirty years from now, how will we cherish the terrible handwriting, the borrowed poetry, the crossed-out sentences, the spelling mistakes and the awkward declarations? Probably, that is what we will miss about love letters. It is still evidence that someone sat down, struggled for the right words, and made something imperfectly their own, for their loved ones.