“Letter writing can be seen as a gift because someone has taken his/her time to write and think and express love.”- Soraya Diase Coffelt
This Mother’s day, we decided to reach out to thousands of children (and some adults too!) all across India to write letters to their Supermoms. And it turned out to be mighty exciting! We got an opportunity to connect with schools, colleges, NGOs, educators and so many students.
To some, we posted the stationery. This consisted of a letter paper and envelope set that celebrated the Indian Supermom, along with a guide that told the students how to go about writing and hand-delivering it to her! They were then organised in the facility by their faculty.
“I want to extend my heart felt gratitude to your team for organizing the letter writing event for my students. They were thrilled to receive the materials and wrote letters to their mother with extreme vigour. The students found immense joy in writing and I’m sure this will lead them to write more in the future.”
– Ankita Banerjee
Teach For India fellow
Govt. Girls Senior secondary school Kalkaji, Delhi
To others, through Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Bhubaneswar, the Battees team travelled and conducted the activity.
“How many of you love your mothers?”
All hands in the room would be risen!
“So we’re going to do something really special for her, to tell her how much we love her. We’re going to write her a letter!”
That would be followed by a discussion around why letters, or why we should write to her even though we see her everyday, or what should even be written, and a lot of other things. The best conversations were when students questioned writing and made arguments against it and we got a chance to convince them otherwise, establishing a place for letters amidst giants like Whatsapp and Facebook.
To the ‘What should we write to her?’, we would often do this little exercise.
“Let’s close our eyes for a minute. And think of all the amazing things our mother does for us. She gets up in the morning even before us, gets us ready, feeds us and sends us to school, helps us with our homework, feeds us bad-tasting green vegetables just because they’re good for us, but also gives us ice cream sometimes! She scolds us to study but also sends us out to play.
There are so many things our mother does for us. Let’s thank her for all of them in this letter, and tell her how much she means to us.”
By then, the students would know what to write. And we knew it was working when they came back to ask for extra paper! In a lot of cases, the faculty or the caretakers also took the stationery and wrote along with the children. “It’s been the longest time since I’ve written”, they would say, and lovingly pen the whole page with their thoughts.
We are extremely thankful to JK Paper who was kind enough to sponsor the campaign, as well as all the organisations and teachers who took it to their students and made this possible. We managed to touch upon 21 different cities, towns, even villages, across 12 states, and got 16,000 students to write letters to their mothers! And it was a beautiful experience for us, as well as the students and their mothers, we hope!
