You’ve got (art) mail

The internet is loud. Not just noisy, but relentless. Open any app and you’re pulled into a vortex of “Sunday reset” vlogs, the fifth skincare haul of the week, hyper-edited shopping hauls, AI-generated art that looks suspiciously like other AI-generated art, and a carousel of hot takes that all start to blur into one another. Somewhere between the fifth and fifteenth haul, you feel it. Fatigue.

Call it algorithm exhaustion. Call it AI slop burnout. Whatever the label, the vibe is the same. We are overstimulated, over-scrolled, and increasingly under-touched. So, it makes sense that the pendulum is swinging back.

Across Indian cities, vinyl listening bars are drawing crowds who want to sit and hear an album from start to finish. Old digicams are selling out because harsh flash and grain feel more “real” than 4K perfection. Film clubs, crotchet circles, zine fairs, and pottery workshops are filling up. And quietly, in padded envelopes addressed in looping calligraphy, snail mail is staging its own comeback.

Not the kind that carries bank statements. I’m talking about art mail: monthly envelopes packed with handwritten letters, art prints, stickers, oracle cards, zines, and tiny surprises that feel less like content and more like care. If Pinterest’s 2026 trend forecast predicts a “letter-writing renaissance”, India is already inching towards it. Even India Post is getting a glow-up. In late 2025, it launched its first “Gen Z” post office at IIT-Delhi, complete with graffiti, Wi-Fi, QR-based bookings, and digital payments via IPPB. Other revamped, student-friendly spaces are emerging across campuses in IIT-Bombay to Andhra University and CMS College in Kerala. The post office, suddenly, is not just functional. It is aesthetic.

For a small but growing group of young artists, it is also becoming creative infrastructure.

For 30-year-old Goa-based tattoo artist Megha Jeevan, art mail is rooted in ritual and nostalgia. “Every year, my parents and I would sit down and write Merry Christmas or Happy New Year mails to all our relatives,” she says. “It was something we genuinely looked forward to.”

Her project, Scratching Post, is barely two months old but it has already built a small, tight-knit subscriber base. Each month, she dispatches envelopes that include a handwritten letter, one or two art prints, handmade stickers, and a rotating surprise element—a habit trackers, a journaling prop or a tiny puzzle piece. Visually, her art mails feel like care packages. Her last one featured an image of a night sky, a colourful sticker along with a bright affirmation card and a pink-themed habit tracker. “I wanted to send out tangible affection,” Jeevan explains. “We’re all chasing the next dopamine hit via doomscrolling. This is me sending out little dopamine packets every month.”

There is also something quietly subversive about her format. Her letters often hold her political opinions and personal angst—thoughts she is often hesitant to post online. “Online, the amount of hate and violence people get… I’m not prepared to talk about my opinions on a very open platform. This feels like a safer, more intimate space.”

In that sense, art mail becomes a curated audience. A consent-based community. A slower conversation that unfolds once a month instead of in real time.

In Thane, 28-year-old Vedanti Shinde came to art mail through practicality as much as passion. A business psychologist and full-time creative, Shinde primarily works in watercolours and hand-drawn illustrations, often pairing playful landscapes and portraits with journaling prompts and interactive inserts. “I invested in a new printer. That was the game changer,” she says. Owning her own printer meant she could print to order instead of outsourcing in bulk, keeping costs lower while experimenting with formats. After a small trial run, she launched a ₹500 monthly subscription that includes a handwritten letter, a 5x7 artwork, and additional inserts such as affirmation cards, journaling prompts, and collaborative colouring sheets.

But sustaining a subscription model in India comes with its own logistical learning curve. As Shinde explains, many international platforms assume customers will pay via credit card or PayPal. “PayPal doesn’t work for everyone. Not everyone has a credit card. Indians prefer UPI. But Razorpay doesn’t integrate smoothly with my existing website,” she explains.

In practical terms, that means creators must juggle multiple payment gateways, manually confirm UPI payments, or even rebuild websites to make subscriptions accessible. For independent artists, these backend hurdles can be as time-consuming as making the art itself.

There is also the matter of scale. When Shinde notes that “most people I know are in their fourth or fifth month. Nobody’s done a full year yet”, she is referring to fellow Indian art mail creators who started around the same time. The format itself is so new in India that very few artists have sustained it long enough to test long-term viability. “Last month I had a subscriber who dropped out completely because my art style ‘didn’t fit her’,” she says, adding that building an art mail in India is learning not to internalise these moments.

Part of the slow build, she suggests, is demographic. “Our generation is just beginning to have disposable income and choosing to invest in art,” says the Gen Z artist. 

The new-age subscribers of this old-fashioned form are in their mid to late twenties or early thirties. They are young professionals, sometimes dual-income couples without children, sometimes freelancers or creatives themselves. With Art Mails, they are not interested in buying high-end gallery art, but are willing to spend ₹300 to ₹500 a month on something personal and tactile.

In Hyderabad, 21-year-old Computer Science student and artist Udita describes her subscription as something like an “art grant” to herself. “I wanted to make designs more tangible. Something I could hold in my hands. Something I could send out to other people,” she shares.

Each month, her subscribers receive two A5 postcard prints, one a scan of a canvas painting and the other a mixed-media poster, alongside custom-designed oracle cards, stickers, interactive inserts, and a handwritten letter. “It’s like I’m giving myself a permission stamp that says, I can do this every month,” she reflects. Across cities and price points, the motivations vary. For some, it is nostalgia. For others, financial experimentation. For many, it is about reclaiming attention in an attention economy that rarely pauses.

The analogue revival is not anti-digital. Every one of these artists relies on Instagram to announce drops, share previews, and build audiences. Subscribers often post unboxing stories. The irony is obvious. You log off to create, then log on to sell the log-off experience.

Jeevan acknowledges that tension. “It does bother me that, at the end of the day, I’m selling something,” she admits. But perhaps that contradiction is inevitable. Young creatives today are building businesses inside the very systems they are trying to soften.

In many ways, art mail feels like a form of what the internet now calls “friction maxxing.” In a world engineered for speed, where you can double tap a piece of art and forget it in seconds, ordering art mail forces you to slow down. You have to place the order, wait for it to arrive, open the envelope, unfold the letter, and sit with the artwork before deciding whether to clip it onto your fridge, pin it to your wall, or tuck it into a book. The friction is the point. It turns art from a fleeting scroll into something that occupies space in your life. Not viral. Not instant. Just deliberate.