You’ve got Anthrax!

We have it on the excellent authority of the celebrated scientist, Stephen Hawking, that the brief history of time is going to get briefer. He gives human beings roughly a thousand years before they transmogrify into a giant collection of bacteria floating around like invisible ghosts on Planet Earth. ‘‘In the long term,’’ Hawking had said, ‘‘I am more worried about biology. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a supervirus that destroys us.’’

After a fortnight when a sprinkling of a white substance called Anthrax, which looked as harmless as talcum for babies, had all but sent a thunderbolt of terror through the world, Hawking seems to be dead on, quite literally so. Now who was it who said, in the long run we are all dead?

What’s tragic in all this though is that the Anthrax attackers have chosen as the delivery system for their nefarious noxiousness that most nondescript of communication aids: the posted letter. That humble conveyor belt of communication, that carrier pigeon of human civilisation, that white flag of friendship. The innocence, the trust, the romance, the very ordinariness of the letter in the mail has now departed. The envelope in the post is now no longer a bearer of tidings, good or bad, but a potential time bomb, a possible missile, a likely killer.

Think about it, where would we have been without our daily mail, which is only a little less precious than our daily bread? What would we have done without the services of that little white envelope containing a few sheets of paper beginning with the classic opener: ‘Dear So and So...’ with assorted endings ranging from the formal ‘Yoursincerely’ (fortunately, the obsequious ‘Yours Faithfully’ of yore seems to have faded into obscurity) to the numerous ardent expressions of loverspeak, of which ‘Forever Yours’ appears to be something of an all-time favourite.

That latter-day pretender, the e-mail or electronic-mail, could never quite replace its less virtual cousin. While punching in a quick e-mail, one tends to be not just careless about grammar and sloppy about construction but generally cavalier about commitment. Putting script to paper imposes its own logic. You tend to cross your ‘t’s, refer to the dictionary for the right spellings and re-read what has been written or typed.

Besides, with the e-mail, you do not need to fix on envelopes those small pieces of paper with serrated edges — bearing images ranging from profiles of queens and the maps of nations to butterflies and birds — before despatching the message into the great void. E-mails, as you may have noticed, don’t need stamps, alas.

Yes, and e-mails don’t need postmen either. Those footsoldiers of human interaction who brave the rains, the dogs and illegible handwriting to get the message through.

Think, too, about the great missives that entered the pages of history in ink and paper. Consider M.K. Gandhi’s spidery hand that generously consumed the paper that it ran on. Take this letter he wrote from Sabarmati Ashram, dated March 1930, to the then viceroy, Lord Irwin: ‘‘I must not be misunderstood. Though I hold the British rule in India to be a curse, I do not, therefore, consider Englishmen in general to be worse than any other people on earth...’’ Could such a sentiment have been conveyed through e-mail? I wonder.

Today, when envelopes ostensibly bearing letters are regarded with trepidation and loathing, when the central legislative body of the world’s only superpower shuts down under the threat of the posted powder, when the FBI and the police department are rushed in to handle them and do so only after donning what appears to be space suits, protective macintoshes and gas masks, something in the world seems to have been inevitably altered.

Earlier, when somebody referred to a distinguished man of letters, we pictured an erudite academic who had authored numerous tomes on some arcane subject. Today, the same expression is more likely than not to conjure up the image of a faceless purveyor of fear, carefully writing an address on an envelope with his left hand and dropping it, along with its deadly contents, into some deserted mailbox under the cover of darkness.

Mourn, therefore, the lost innocence of the letter. It will never be the same again.

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