Penning down on beautiful & colorful writing pads, buying smart pens, choosing impressive postage stamps and inserting pictures & view cards in elegant & scented envelopes were some of the hallmarks of pen-friendship. The exciting moment was when one received a letter from an unknown person, unknown city/country with a request for friendship. Who would send his/her picture first between the two newly pen-friends was the trickiest as well as funniest thing of pen-friendship. Faking the identity from a boy to a girl or otherwise was non-existent in that relatively simple life. Pen-friendship was all about writing letters; no oral communication.
I remember receiving my first ever letter for pen-friendship from an elderly boy living in a comparatively smaller town. It was beautifully hand-written in rich Urdu and I had to seek the help of my elder brother to fully comprehend it. Brimming with jubilation I ran to my parents to share the exhilaration with them. Making a new friend or breaking away from the old one like practice kept on for years except the one; once my father sent me a packet which contained a small transistor (radio) and a letter addressed in my name while I was a boarder in the hostel of Engineering University in 1979-80. The envelope had a stamp of a foreign country. With sheer excitement I opened it and to my utter disbelief it had come from a girl. Why a girl hailing from a cosmopolitan city would write to a boy living in an ordinary town of Pakistan? Where did she get my address from? These were two immediate questions I tried to figure out answers of. After settling down my euphoria and reading the contents of letter repeatedly I learnt that she picked my address from an international pen-pal magazine on the basis of my hobbies i.e. making pen-pals, playing cricket, music, watching movies, etc. In the very next letter she sent her picture and other pictures kept flowing in. I reciprocated in the same manner. Her writing skills were envious, so was her command over vocabulary. On the contrary I communicated in broken English and that even after making drafts on rough papers. In spite of my hiccups our pen-friendship remained unbroken.
Do we still write letters? No longer are they needed because we remain connected through scores of technological gadgets. Electronic mail, texting through cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter are some of the modes of our instant communication. Do we call each other frequently? Never; this is the only trait of traditional pen-friendship left with us that is being followed in its true spirit, though unintentionally.
The romance of writing letters to friends has vanished. The music of a knock on the door by a postman is gone. Once flourishing all across the world in the later half of 20th century, particularly during 1960s to 1980s conventional pen-friendships are no more in vogue. Few years from now, the children will just ask with a frowned forehead what it was all about! Some elderly people maybe still doing it simply out of tradition or fun but the younger generation is not aware of it and surely not interested in it.
The biggest foe of this once ever-loving pastime of young boys and girls is the advent of computer and its subsequent by-product i.e. Internet. The texting facility on cellular phones nailed the casket of pen-friendship once and for all. Conventional pen-pals have gone extinct. Information technology have introduced new terms like cellular friends, facebook followers and twitterites. Friends in these categories run in thousands but do they replace conventional pen-pals is hard to answer!
