Ershadul Huq
No more nervous parents write to their children staying far a way from them in cities or towns asking them to come home at least for a few days to be with them. And children are also not doing so to remove the unrest of minds of their parents. The worried wives do not send letters in sky blue letter pads doing jobs in distant places to know welfare of their spouses or request them to come home to be with the family at least for a day or two.
No more young girls anxiously wait for the village postman to deliver they letters from their beloved ones. They don’ wait for the postman worriedly to know at the door shouting ‘letter’. The postmen wearing dust coloured or light brown uniform with a bag on his shoulder regularly pass through the road in front of their house.
Those days are over with the advancement of science and widespread arrivals of mobile phone. Parents can get information of their children instantly by using the cell phone or the Internet.
The number of personal letters sent through the postal service has alarmingly fallen threatening to make the jobs of postmen redundant.
The advent of cell phone and internet have reduced the necessity of writing letters.
The stories or poems written by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and many other writers, the film made on the story written by Tagore “strir Patra (letter from wife) and the famous song ‘Runer’ by Hamanta Mukharjee and the song sung by Sabina Yiasmin “Chitti Deo, protitin’, all seem to have fallen into oblivion.
But the type appeal and emotion those letters had is now absent in SMS or mobile phone calls. The cell phone has wiped out the appeal of letters.
Shahed, a student of the Department of Social Science of the Commerce College said, ” I wrote a letter to one of my friends many days ago. I met him just a few days back and found the letter in his purse.”
Actually, more could be said in a letter to express the mind, what is impossible in a mobile call.
“Life has become now more mechanised. People now easily can reach beloves ones, parents, wives or husbands using mobile phone.
“I am feeling the urgency to write letter, but it does not happen,” Shahed said.
Jannatun Noor, a middle-aged housewife said cell phone now is a part of life. You had to wait for days to get a reply after writing a letter, but that time has gone.
Noor said, “I still remember the day the man now my husband came to me. I had intension to say him something, but could not. But I wrote those things in a letter easily.”
The letters acted as document of settling disputes. The letters, Chabi Biswas wrote to Uttam Kumar on behalf of (Shuchitra Sen) in London where he went for a higher medical degree in the film ‘Pothe Holo-Deri’, but the letters Uttam Kumar preserved helped him to get back Shuchitra Sen.
Mobasherur Rahman, director general of Bangladesh Postal Service told the New Nation that the number of personal letters has drastically fallen. The number has dwindled to five percent in 10 years. But the number of official and commercial letters rose by 85 percent during the same period.
Courtesy: nation.ittefaq.com
