Outlook’s first issue came out just two months after the first public e-mail was sent in India, 1995. It was predestined, then, that
reflections and reactions on our stories would be dispatched increasingly via mouse clicks than drop-INS at postboxes. A large part now also comes in through online public comments, sent ‘via my iPhone’ or And-roid. But, showing admirable res-ilience in the face of the electronic ons-laught, there exists an old guild among the magazine’s regular letter writers.

The sky blue inland misses few weeks, always typewritten, and then, edited over with a blue ballpoint. A range of names appear in the sign-off, a range of addresses too. The desk has a bunch of theories: is it a collective of people, a secret society from the Deccan with a common editor; does Hyderabad happen to have the biggest concentration of typewri-ter-owning Outlook readers, or is it the same man? We are reluctant to reach a conclusion.

One arrived from right next door on a February morning this year with a clairvoyant scribble at the end, “France will win football world cup.” The notebook handwriters pitch in too, the effort put in across a few spreads at times.

Courtesy demands acknowledgements extend to our ceaseless electronic messengers: M.C. Joshi, Richa Juyal, Rajneesh Batra, V.N.K. Murthy of Pattambi, Rakesh Agarwal, the Bharatiyas, M.Y. Shariff and Santosh Gairola of Taiwan. And the num-erous others we couldn’t name here, they’ll be on the letters page in the weeks of past and future.