Lost data packets in the pre-digital era

 The modern social media apps have shrunk the world. I have been able to connect with my childhood school mates even after a gap of forty years and despite moving a few thousand miles away from that place. But at the same time, I do long to connect with a few of the missing ones, who perhaps have not adapted to the modern digital milieu. My generation has been at the wrong end of this digital transition and while a few have sailed through this evolution, some have got stuck in the past and hence are in digital oblivion.

Not so long ago, when I was in my school, the only mode of remote communication was through snail mail. The telephone did exist but that was more a symbol of luxury for the middle class. Unlike the interactive chat today, the friends and relatives exchanged letters to communicate well-being, to share news or just to socialize remotely. I have grown watching my parents write letters regularly to our relatives in distant south. My mother wrote to someone or the other almost as a routine every day and my father would do his quota of communication every weekend. And it was my duty to run to the post box at a nearby cross to beat the deadline of the last clearance of the day. The postal system, in those days, could generate the same sentiment as the social media exchanges do today – albeit with a time lag and no smileys to conclude.

There were no digital footprints to track and trace old friends. If one didn’t maintain an address book and did not record the addresses, it was difficult to trace back a friend once the connect was lost. There was no social media search engine and there was no one orchestrating a lost data packet. Your postman was like an internet connection that came online only once in a day and downloaded messages sent to you a couple of days back. But the system worked wonderfully and was a witness to many emotional stories.

When I was in my High School, my elder sister’s marriage was fixed. We were in Kanpur but the marriage was to be solemnized in Chennai. Well ahead of time, my parents had written to all the relatives to book their tickets well in advance to be able to join us for the occasion.  The address lists were prepared to ensure that no one was missed out.

The list had all the relatives but there were none on my father’s maternal side.  He had lost his mother when he was just 9 years old. While my grand-father lived in Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu, my grand-mother’s origin was at a distant place called Trichur in the current day Kerala. He had lost touch with all his relatives from his mother’s side, but used to fondly remember a cousin of his, who, he last knew, was a head-master in the local government school.

My mother was a lady with a very strong determination. She would never give up on anything without making a sincere and most concerted attempt. She wanted to give a surprise to my father by reaching out to his long-lost cousin and inviting him to the marriage. She knew that my uncle would have retired by that time but knew how well the social networking worked in small towns. So, she wrote a letter addressed to the Head Master of the local government school at Trichur. She explained the situation in the letter and requested the enclosed envelop to be delivered to his predecessor. I am not sure if she got a response back.

A day before the marriage, early in the morning, one Mr. Seetharaman arrived at the doors of my relatives in Chennai, where we were camping before the marriage. It took sometime for my father to place him but once he recognized his long-lost cousin, he was in the seventh heaven. And then Mr. Seetharaman narrated the whole story of a letter from my mother landing at his doors with full details of the event and he had no second thoughts about joining this event despite his poor health.

In today’s digital world, the whole sequence doesn’t sound as providential as it would have been in those days. The social media search engines can track anyone with even the smallest of the digital trace. Whenever I narrate this story to my children they are not able to correlate to the excitement underlying my narration.  To them, I say that even in the pre-digital era my mother knew the IP networking principles well ahead of time. She knew how to transmit a packet of data by resorting to the best and most efficient route in the network – and without any packet loss. Modern technology has just replicated that.