New Delhi, Feb. 14 -- More than two decades ago when she was in college in Nagpur, Kusum Rohra, now 44 and mother to a nine-year-old living in Bengaluru, wrote letters to her then boyfriend every day. It was a difficult year for her, away from her parents in Ulhasnagar, Maharashtra. "There were no mobile phones and STD calls cost a bomb. Since I wasn't into watching TV and didn't have many friends in the new place, every evening I wrote letters until dinner, and sometimes late into the night," she says.

Usually, she wrote about her days-a song she'd enjoyed listening to, a book she'd read. "It was almost like a journal," Rohra remembers. "There was one particularly long letter I wrote in which I summarised Erich Segals' Love Story." The ...