By Prof. Suresh Chander
The Last Letter Writer from the Red Box Era
There was a time when letters to the editor travelled by train. I would begin one in the half-light of a compartment rattling between stations, fold the sheet with care, and drop it into the red post box at the next halt. The letter would smell faintly of iron dust and diesel, but a week later it would find its way into print — a small black column in The Times of India or The Hindustan Times. Sometimes it appeared unaltered; sometimes a sub-editor’s blue pencil trimmed a sentence or two. Either way, it felt like participation — the satisfaction of seeing one’s words stitched into the nation’s conversation.
That was the India of longhand conviction. We wrote with fountain pens and posted with faith. There were no instant acknowledgments, no “likes,” no viral outrage. Yet letters mattered because they were measured. Even disagreement carried the courtesy of reflection. The letters page was the middle ground where citizens and policymakers, students and retired officials, teachers and editors, met in print as equals.
Among the many exchanges I cherish, one stands apart. It was an extended correspondence with Syed Shahabuddin on the Babri Masjid dispute, carried by The Sunday Times of India across four weekends in the early 1990s. We differed sharply — he argued from a constitutional and minority-rights perspective, I from a historical and civic one. But our words were guided by a mutual assumption that reason was still possible. Each week, one of us replied to the other in print. Readers wrote in, not to take sides but to deepen the debate. It was, in retrospect, a small island of civility before the storm that would later engulf Ayodhya and much else besides.
Those letters remind me of something almost quaint today — that argument can be an act of respect. You disagreed because you believed the other was capable of understanding. In our exchanges there was no anonymity, no trolling, no rehearsed indignation. Only pen, paper, and the patience of print.
The red box itself was a kind of teacher. It demanded thought before action. Once the envelope slipped through the slot, there was no delete key. You had to live with your words — and that restraint gave them weight. In the quiet interval between writing and publication, ideas cooled, matured, sometimes even softened. That cooling period was democracy’s cooling period too.
Then came the electronic age, dazzling and deafening. The red boxes faded, and so did the long pauses that nurtured reflection. The newspaper’s letters page shrank to a corner; the column of civic voices was replaced by the scroll of instant opinion. Even family members now greet a serious thought with a polite “अच्छा,” as if to say, “Yes, but let’s move on.” The reader has become a viewer; the listener, a scroller.
And yet, I find solace in small things. Some of my former students — now professors, officials, engineers scattered across continents — have told me they still recall those old letters. They discuss them occasionally, in email groups or reunion chats. The printed fragments I once sent into the unknown have found afterlives in memory. That, I think, is the quiet reward of persistence: the real audience often arrives years later.
Lately, I have been gathering those yellowed cuttings — brittle pieces of another India — and plan to print this very essay on their reverse sides. The idea pleases me. The new words will rest upon the old; the present will literally lean on the past. Somewhere in those fading lines I can still read the inked debates of another era — names like Shahabuddin, letters signed “A Concerned Citizen,” “A Teacher,” “A Student of History.” Each voice belonged to someone who believed that expression carried responsibility.
I am aware that I may indeed be the last letter writer from the red box era. The post office near my home still keeps one, paint flaking, standing like a sentry forgotten by its regiment. When I pass it, I sometimes imagine dropping a letter again — not to the editor this time, but to the idea of listening itself.
And so I write this piece for a friend’s younger brother in Vancouver — a new kind of letter, travelling not by train but through light. Perhaps he will read it on a screen between meetings, perhaps he will smile and scroll. Still, a line will have crossed an ocean, as it once crossed provinces by rail.
The tools have changed; the faith has not. To write is still to believe that someone, somewhere, is reading — maybe not today, maybe not aloud, but with attention.
The red box is gone, but the letter endures.
“Written in remembrance of a slower India, when thought travelled by post and conversation by print.”
Promod Puri.com 