more-in What started as a way to get back in touch with friends and family, has now evolved into a project under which Mumbai based product designer Tawfik Manham makes one postcard a day and sends them out to virtual strangers. All you have to do is log on to his Instagram account at https://www.instagram.com/tawfikmanham/ and place a request for one. His journey into becoming a postcard maker in 2015 took off when he joined design school in Ahmedabad, away from friends and family. Tawfik wanted to stay in touch with them but not through social media. “Social media messages are impersonal and convey no immediate sense of belonging. People would copy-paste the same ‘hi’ to practically every one,” he says. That’s when the idea of making personalised postcards came to him. In 2015 he took up a challenge of making one postcard a day and shouted out online to all his friends on Facebook and Instagram. He requested interested people to give him their postal address so he could send them a postcard. And the response was over-whelming. The art work on each postcard would differ from the other. One would carry a form of calligraphy while the other would have a whale painted on it in watercolour. Tawfik makes use of pencil colours, markers and all other forms to deliver a personal message to each of his friends. “I started having fun with the project and eventually it became a thing for me to make one postcard every day for people from all parts of the world,” he says adding how he now has pen-pals from all over. Living up to a quote by Mary E. Pearson, “The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it,” Tawfik is helping the world shrink and come together. His art work has universal appeal and finds takers from across the globe. Inspiration for art-work on postcards would come from his everyday surroundings or anything that caught his attention. The drawings on postcards look easy and imitable, but they come from a place of deep introspection. At times Tawfik takes up writing about a social message like plant a tree or about the children in Aleppo. He makes use of the means to make people get back to the old form of communication, using a highly personal means of exchange to convey a message that is special. So far Tawfik has sent around 500 postcards to people in 20 countries apart from India. Some of the recipients of these postcards write back to him thereby creating a postcard swapping club. “Some friends from Korea and Malaysia write back to me and then I write to them again. We have found several such postcard swapping clubs that help in keeping this form of communication alive,” he tells me. The 29 year old has taken up a fresh challenge in 2017 to make one postcard every day and is currently running it under the hashtag #postcardperday on Instagram. As a future project, Tawfik has a book of postcards in mind. A seasonal collection of 30-50 postcards that people can buy and put to use. But otherwise done without an intention to monetise the venture, Tawfik plans on carrying this forward for the rest of the year without charging money from people for it. “Now people write in to me requesting a postcard for a friend on their birthday or a parent on their retirement day,” he says. He accepts all these requests and says that it allows him to be more creative. Conveying a message or just a play of colours at other times, these postcards make the recipients happy and that is exactly how Tawfik likes it. “If I am able to make someone smile or make someone think of a happy thought even for a bit, then I think that makes my day,” he says.

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