Pen pals

An Email from a pal in the late 90’s was good enough to start a new friendship.
It was a great feeling to see that new email from your pen friend sitting in your mail or inbox waiting for you to find and read it. You read it not once, but again and again going through the lines which your friend from a distant land had written to you. You would then take the time to draft, review, correct and send a crisp and neat reply back. It was important, as the  strength of the friendship bond depended on your very replies.

In those times, pen pals appeared in books, newspaper columns, chat rooms and on pen pal sites and that was good enough for anyone to start and strike a friendship with one whom you found suitable and who shared your some if not all interests. The profile write up was therefore quite important to let others know who you, as a person was, for them to decide and send you that first reply.

The first few reply mails would decide the conversion ratio and  whether the friendship would last or get lost as fast as it had started. But yes, for the persistent types, those who believed in a good genuine friendship did last whereas some got lost over a few months or a years as the communication dried up due to lack of the initial curiosity or both friends getting lost in their work or personal problems.

Some of these pals disappeared into oblivion and it was neither yours nor their fault. I always believed, out there in the world, there are people who get close to you in different periods of time, get friendly, share your joys and sorrows and then leave so as to give the same joy and sharing to others in solitude and pining for friendship. You would have new ones come into your lonely life and the saga continued. In those days, you never thought you would meet any of your pals in person and this thought rarely came to mind, as distant pals were like stars in the sky waiting to give you glow and warmth in your journey of life…

On an ending note, I was fortunate enough to meet a few of my not so distant star pals over a pen palling period of 20 years.