Why give up old habits for new?

'Unlike Pratury, I never kept the letters my father wrote to me, relegating them to the trash each time I had replied in my obsessive need to keep my life free of clutter. But my father was more prescient. Shortly after his death, I discovered a neat folder where every single letter I had ever written to him had been neatly filed. There was my first letter on reaching California, my letter to him about my first campus job on a sandwich line, my car troubles, my decision to return to India. Every word that I had written had been kept and filed and stored by him in this chronicle of memories that now moved beyond life and death to connect us together again.

There is something inherently honest about the old fashioned art of handwriting. Another genetic link—my daughters—would write me little notes when they were much younger. Amid crayon drawings of flowers and butterflies, they scribbled: “I love you, Mama”. Like my father did for me, I kept them in a plastic folder. Later, when I asked my daughter why she stopped sending me those notes, she looked me in the eye and replied: “But you never wrote back to me.” '

- Namita Bhandare; 'Is it the last chapter for the write stuff?'