When was the last time you put your feelings down to paper? This was the question that designer Vanessa Meister Varma and the founder of French Toast Cafe, Ayaz Salim asked each other before launching an initiative to bring postcards back into the lives of the people of Kochi. “It’s just that this sense of connection is lost in our time,” says Vanessa who moved to Kochi from Switzerland over 9 years ago. She goes on, “It has become difficult to have a connection or to do anything with meaning. Look at the way we send messages through WhatsApp with half the letters missing. There’s so much lost between these blue ticks.”
Vanessa has designed colourful postcards that people can deposit in a small letter box installed outside the cafe. She says, “We forget to tell people the little things like sorry or thank you and sometimes, they can mean the most. I wanted ask them to sit down, take a breather and open their eyes to everything that is going on around them. There’s so much we go without saying and this initiative is about just saying the words. Everyove knows the feeling we get when we find a letter sent to us through the mail. We want to bring that back. We’re simply trying to capture a moment.”
The initiative was received with love and excitement by French Toast’s faithful customers. Ayaz says, “We’re bakers here and when we do anything, we like to make sure that every ingredient has been accounted for. That’s what’s missing in our daily lives.” And the ingredient we seem to be running short of is human effort. He continues, “We want people to take their eyes off of these devices and see the person writing a letter, the postman and the people receiving them. We need to start seeing each other again.” Yes, let’s open our eyes and pour our hearts into a handwritten postcard.
