Some of you like to send photos of yourselves along with your emails in Internet. My photo is at the beginning of my Web, though it’s time I should change it as quite a few years have passed since that shot. But now there is question of cybernetic relationships, and this is a new type of relationship which we are learning to understand, and it will be good to try to define it. I appreciate and enjoy email, and at the same time I’m aware that I will never meet in my life most of the people who write to me. It is here that the photo question comes up. To send or not to send? I’m going to tell you an experience of mine years ago in India that has made me think, and can throw some light on the question at hand. Here it is. 

Once I received in my own city of Ahmedabad in India a letter from a young girl unknown to me, who introduced herself as a young university student and was asking my opinion about something. Her name was Sonali. I answered immediately in the midst of all the mail of the day (the paper-and-pen mail of those days), and I forgot about her. After a few days I received an envelope with my name and address, and as there was no sender’s address on the front, I turned the envelope around and found that there were only these words written on it: “Open me gently.” That was some fun. The letter came from the same girl, and said the following:

“My very dear and rather brutish Father,
I got your answer. Clear, correct, to the point. Thank you very much. The efficient, quick, insensitive person. You may be very intelligent as they say, but you have no idea how to deal with those who write to you, particularly young people. I’m very shy. I thought a lot before writing to you, I doubted, I waited, I wrote the letter in awe as it was my first letter to someone important, I tore it, wrote it again, checked it, posted it, and remained shaking under the strain of the mischief and the adventure. And then you come on and answer me at once. With that, your answer has lost its value. You should have made me wait, should have left days and days pass so that I would keep thinking of you, wondering whether you had received my letter or not, whether you had liked it or not, whether you would answer it or not; you should have let me get impatient, angry, anxious, desperate. But no. You, with your ‘clean desk’ complex, had to answer me by return of post. Letter comes, letter goes. One to the waste-paper basket, and take the next to answer. How can I have any relationship with you in that way? How can I appreciate your answer? At the end of your letter you tell me very properly, ‘if I can help you in anything else, don’t hesitate to write again.’ You are the one who needs help. On top of it, you add: ‘You can also come and meet me in my residence at St Xavier’s College if you want.’ And if I don’t want? I’m not bound to come to you in person. Not that I’m not pretty, which I am, but I prefer you to imagine me as you please. I hope you are a good artist. Of course, you could also come to my home, as I have written my address on top and my house is not far from yours, and you can come if you wish. You will ring the bell, I will open the door for you, you will ask ‘Is Sonali at home?’, I will answer, ‘No, she is not at home’, and you’ll have to go back the way you came. For my part, yes, I’ve seen you. The other day in the talk you gave in the Town Hall I was in the first row. But don’t look for me. And, please, don’t answer me by return of post. Asking your blessing, Sonali.”

Thank you, Sonali. You made me laugh and you made me think. Spirited girl! And you say you are shy. I wonder what would happen if you weren’t. Mind your charms, Sonali, you’re full of them.

Today I have remembered Sonali. Nowadays Internet has created a new type of relationship between users, independent from physical presence. That’s why I prefer you don’t send me photographs of yourselves. I want to be a good artist.

[Sonali kept a happy correspondence with me several years. I never saw her.]

Boris Becker tells in his autobiography:
 “What bothered me most of all was claustrophobia. I hated feeling hemmed in. I had to take a firm grip on myself not to lose it completely. It nearly happened once, after a concert by the three tenors Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras in the Munich Olympiahalle. Barbara and I met the singers backstage after the event. We were going to a huge restaurant afterwards, where there’d be thousands of guests of honour. There were about ten of us in the stadium’s lift: the conductor, Zubin Mehta, the singers, wives and girlfriends. The lift got stuck. Not for a couple of minutes, but for half an hour. Thanks to my height I had space and air. Domingo, my wife and Pavarotti all held hands, hoping it would be over soon. Then Pavarotti began to hum ‘Ave Maria’. I didn’t say anything. I was just thinking of my own little unimportant life, and trying to hold myself together, though the thought of what would happen if no one rescued us soon almost drove me mad. The tenors sang one song after another, and everyone hummed along. Anxious arias – what a scene that was. Then there was a jolt – the rescue. The concert in the lift was over.”
(Boris Becker, The Player, Bantam Books, London 2008, p. 107)

“You have to be acutely aware of your limits, physical and mental, in order to go beyond them.” (102)
“Sometimes I even felt real hatred for my opponent, but hatred gives bad advice. In these cases I never played particularly well.” (311)

“We are in Wimbledon waiting beneath the royal box for the signal to start. To enter the court we will pass under a board on which is famously written a couple of lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem If.
‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster                 
and treat those two impostors just the same.’ (25)

“Andre Agassi revealed to me why he was so often the victor in our encounters. It was a trivial thing, but rather incredible too. He’d noticed that during my serve I opened my mouth and stuck out my tongue in the direction in which I was going to send the ball. My serve was rendered almost useless, while his return was his best shot. After that I kept my mouth shut.” (307)