Today is my brother in law’s birthday…he lives in the US and all I had to do to show that I cared and remembered was send an e-greeting… how convenient…but how impersonal… And while I say that to myself, I realize that in all our humdrum and chaos of connectivity and being reachable; its extremely daunting to remember birthdays and anniversaries and other such important dates and days in our lives… we have become lazy as a culture… lackadaisical and even jaded to some extent…
When I was little, my mother taught me how to make a greeting card album…first of course there weren’t any emails and e-greetings and twitters and Facebook… (Bah! Facebook even helps you remember important dates in people’s lives)…but in those days to have received a greeting card on one’s birthday and a phone call on one’s anniversary gave one that special buoyant feeling that you are remembered, thought about and people care to remember when you first landed on this planet 🙂 So well yes, everyone sent handwritten letters or cards … and we received a dozen… every year…anniversaries, birthdays, just to say hello cards, congratulation cards to wish on getting good grades in school and invitation cards to marriages et al. My mother used to buy the simple drawing books or sketch books and paste the cards in there… soon we had some two or three such large drawing books full of lovely greeting cards and invitation cards…they were such amazing conversation starters when people came over… they were some things that I showed off to my friends… they became my store house of creative ideas and designs that I could draw from…
Image is from http://www.clarks-news.co.uk/
So everyone I knew had a coin album, stamp album and all that… but I had greeting card album… my grand parents marriage invitation card, my brothers annaprashan ceremony (first time a child is given rice to eat ) cards, my parents wedding anniversary cards, cards from my friends, and new year cards…
But now we don’t get cards that often… we send e-greetings.. so there is hardly anything to collect… of course we do save a lot of trees by not sending paper cards and all that… but the charm of remembering people is lost… Facebook helps you remember birthdays, 123 greetings helps you send e-cards, you sms wishes and even have gtalk statuses saying Happy Birthday dear… but the old world charm of Oh-you-remembered-my-birthday excitement has faded… guess am aging … but then am not complaining… it’s something I miss… a fond memory of beautiful thoughts, lovely words, thank you notes and three dimensional two folds that made each of those days so special… 🙂
Bizarre Bazaar... 