Perhaps that should read as “Because two computers are better than one.”
The internet has made it possible for us to have more pen pals than one would have thought possible when pen pals were all the rage. I had one brush with that phenomenon.
I was all of 13 years old when my cousin Mangala who was the librarian at the United States Information Service Library in Madras put me in touch with a young lad of the same age from the USA named Johny Horrigan Jr. The USIS had a program to encourage such exchanges and Johny and I exchanged a few letters and photographs taken with our box cameras, during the next two years and both simply tapered off due to other preoccupations. We had Boy Scouts as the only common interest and there was the dampener that I did not have a clue about base ball and he about cricket!
After that great experience, all my penning was to people I knew and I was an inveterate writer of letters. I wrote to my friends, cousins, mother and a few times to the editor of the local news papers too. But I never got back to making pen pals till the advent of the internet.
I don’t know if I can call my internet friends who I have not met face to face as pen pals but it makes sense to me to. I don’t put a pen to paper to write to them, but type on a key board I do to correspond with them through emails, facebook, blog posts and comments; and now with the world becoming smaller on skype, whatsap, sms and so on too.
If I am allowed to include my internet friends, then my list of pen pals would run into a very large number and one of these days, I shall sit down and count and give this post an update. In the meanwhile, I am glad that I have them in my life and I hope that they are happy that I am in their life too.
I hope that you enjoyed reading this post on the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where six of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic was chosen by yours truly. The five other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, gaelikaa, Maxi, Paul, Shackman, and The Old Fossil. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!