Rediscovering snail-mail

Mallika Mahidhar is a lawyer by day, who spends her nights painting postcards for her social media followers. What started in June 2015 as a simple Facebook status very soon evolved into something much bigger than her expectations.

The project, which she simply named The Postcard Project, started with sending out postcards to social media followers. “I wanted to send a little something to my social media followers, mostly people following me on Twitter. These are people I talk to, but don’t ‘really’ talk to, you know,” Mallika says. Earlier, she used to send out postcards to her followers through her Instagram and Twitter handles, but now, since her discovery of Google documents, she prefers using Google forms.

The 23-year-old lawyer clarifies that she sends out only postcards and not letters. When writing to friends, she likes to include something special or intimate. When she is writing to strangers, she generally begins with introducing herself. “I either start with introducing myself, or talk about books — books are your saviours everywhere,” she says. The content of every postcard, however, depends on her mood.

In the past one and a half years, Mallika has sent out over 350 postcards to people all over the globe. “As of now, I have received around 40 requests in the last month and I plan to send out postcards to them soon. I write two to three postcards every week,” she says.

Since she sent out her first few postcards, she started getting requests from people to make custom-made postcards.

Mallika’s inspiration to keep writing, painting on postcards and sending them out doesn’t seem to fade away. After a long day at work, she comes home to a stack of postcards she bought from the post office (“after receiving strange looks from the office personnel there,” she quips) and paints on them. “I just wanted to make people smile, connect with strangers, reconnect with lost friends and go back to the age old, most beautiful form of communication — snail mail,” she fondly adds.