NavDharmyug

F. Scott Fitzgerald With his Daughter, Scottiee I was, of late, putting together an article on the letters of Francis Scott Fitzgerald or FSF. I have always been enamored by his writing. Fitzgerald had a daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, whom he lovingly addressed as Scottie or Scottina. Scottie was borne in October, 1921, soon after Fitzgerald married Zelda, the daughter of a Judge, riding on the success of his first book, This Side of the Paradise. Scott Fitzgerald’s later life was fraught with difficulties, financial and otherwise. He lived apart from Zelda who mostly lived out of hospitals, searching for the cure for her chronic depression. His later work could not replicate the early success of The Tales of the Jazz Age, and The Other Side of Paradise,  and his slip into abject poverty could not even be arrested by The Great Gatsby, which could get its due only after his sad death at the age of 44. He lived away Scottie, and wanted to teach her all that he coul...

We are flooded with communications and a splurge of media is overwhelming our lives. The Social media is ubiquitous, addictive and imperiously intrusive in modern lives. It has fooled us to believe that it is a mode of communication, replacing something as humble and thoughtful as a letter. Communication is two people talking to each other, which is not the case with Social media. It talks at you. The letters, those humble things which arrived with promises and hope in the envelopes carried a little bit of the soul of the writer in them. When the reader read them, ran his or her fingers over the writings with ink smudged due to bad nib, damp weather or tears, we touched the other person. The fact that writing letters took time and effort made it impossible for one not to leave something of oneself on those pages. The letters tell you a lot about the person who wrote them and therefore reading letters of historical figures is a re-discovery of the great minds and souls as thinking, ...