Bangalore, Aug. 7: Anubhav Ankit's morning tomorrow may begin with a love letter to a young woman in Mysore, telling her that marriage is now round the corner with the long-awaited promotion happening last evening.

But don't blame him if he then writes out a resignation letter. Or if he begins planning how exactly to phrase his next letter, an amorous one to that Russian college girl.

Ankit is not a cad or a Casanova. He is just one of three young Bangalorean professionals who have taken it upon themselves to stem the all-conquering march of email, text messaging and social media by reviving the handwritten letter.

And, in a give-and-take with the spirit of the age, they have decided that if the art of letter writing is to survive, it has to be outsourced.

Ankit, Jashwanth Cheripally and Shashank Srinivas write letters for others, much like the local postman or lone village matriculate in old Hindi movies.

Except that the trio do it for the educated and upwardly mobile through their start-up in the city, which they dug deep into their savings to launch last December.

"We come from different backgrounds and different parts of the country but have one thing in common: a passion for old-fashioned letter-writing," Ankit told The Telegraph.

Ankit was an engineering graduate turned radio jockey from Cuttack who had arrived in Bangalore three years ago in search of better opportunities. Jashwanth is a techie from Hyderabad while local boy Shashank is a mass communications graduate with an interest in marketing. They have chosen an old-fashioned name for their enterprise - The Indian Handwritten Letter Company - "to keep it very Victorian".

"We've had a very interesting run so far, writing letters for husbands and boyfriends, for daughters who want to tell their mothers how wonderful they are, or for employees nervous about writing to their bosses," Ankit said.

A variety of reasons cause their clients to outsource their letters: they don't know how to phrase it, or they have never written a letter before, or they just have bad handwriting.

Some who log on to the company website, therefore, post the entire content of the letter, to be handwritten on premium paper and posted to the desired address. Others just send the essential points for the writer to flesh out.

The clients can pick the writing style: cursive, calligraphic --- which the trio have trained in --- or informal.

Asked why someone would trust a stranger to write their personal messages, Ankit cited a resignation letter he had written for a British client, avoiding names or too many details to honour client confidentiality.

"She found us via Google and asked us to pen a well-worded resignation letter as she was stagnating in her job as a merchandiser but didn't know how to present her decision to her boss," he said.

"After the letter was delivered, she emailed us saying she had instead been given a 45 per cent salary hike for the manner in which she chose to convey the message."

Some letters pose a tougher challenge. A young male Briton had a letter commissioned to break the news to his parents that he was gay.

"Not knowing how to tell his parents, he got a three-page latter written with minute details about his innermost feelings," Ankit said. "It was perhaps the most emotional letter we have written."

While the bulk of the initial clientele was from Europe, Australia and America, Indians too have begun warming to the idea of getting their letters handwritten.

Domestic letters come at Rs 99 apiece, inclusive of postage, while international ones cost Rs 540 each.

"We usually mail the letters within three days but users can customise the delivery date and even the time," Ankit said.

That raises the cost, because the company has to hire a courier.

There's a small catch for clients from outside Bangalore: they have to own up to the receiver that they didn't write the letter themselves, unless they are ready to explain why the envelope bears a post office seal from the Karnataka capital.

Especially, say, if the letter is from a man in Seoul to his wife in a Korean village.

Besides English, the company now does letters in Russian, Korean, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu and Odiya.

In the case of a foreign-language letter, the trio get the draft done by an outside source and then copy --- "paint" in Ankit's words --- the alien script artistically on paper.

"We plan to add more Indian and foreign languages to our arsenal," Ankit said.

He insists the operation is fully manual: "Once a client mails us the content, we start a zero-tech operation with pen, paper and lots of concentration."

And imagination, too. A mother in Delhi had approached the company to write a letter on behalf of her 10-year-old daughter who tended to break wind in class, inviting taunts.

To bail her out, her class teacher had asked her to write a funny letter on why it happened and why there was nothing wrong in letting it out.

"We drafted a humorous letter blaming her English breakfast of baked beans. The teacher read the letter out in class and it all ended with a good laugh," Ankit said.

Business is growing. "Three months ago we were doing 10 to 15 letters a week. Today we do 70 to 100 a day," Ankit said.

"Many young people have never experienced the heart-warming feeling of receiving a handwritten letter. Once they do, many become hooked."

A young marketing professional here who used the service to send a letter on her mother's birthday a couple of months ago has since then got the company to write many more.

"Electronic messaging was out of the question since my mother is not tech-savvy. That was when I stumbled upon this service," said Parul Pandey.

"My mother was very impressed with the letter. She thought I had written it, though I have never ever written one."

She added: "I even got one written for myself, just to feel the warmth a handwritten letter brings."