Media : Men of Many Letters Deluge India’s Papers : Hundreds of missives arrive daily for the Bombay press from cranks, casual correspondents and serious critics.

In a cramped fifth-floor walk-up in this gritty north Bombay suburb, Anthony Parakal adjusts his thick glasses and carefully feeds a crisp sheet of paper into a battered portable typewriter.

“Sir,” he types at the top, as always.

Parakal is a man of letters--a great many letters. By his count, the 61-year-old retired railway clerk has had more than 3,750 letters to the editor published in a dozen major Bombay newspapers over the last 38 years. No one questions the claim: He writes at least one a day.

“If I don’t write, I feel the day incomplete,” he said happily, amid stacks of yellowed clippings in dusty, dog-eared scrapbooks. “Some people smoke, some people drink. For me, this is an addiction.”

Others obviously share the habit. Hundreds of letters pour into Bombay’s papers each day, praising virtue, condemning sin and otherwise competing to comment on everything from nuclear disarmament to “the central opacity of Kantian metaphysics,” as one writer put it politely.

In a tradition begun by the British, a news story or letter often sparks a firestorm of letters from casual correspondents, chronic critics and common cranks. Then come replies, responses and repudiations. And on come the letters until the newspaper editor calls a cease-fire in the war of words with a terse, “Correspondence on this issue is now closed.”

“Sometimes they close the correspondence at their own sweet will, when the subject is not even closed,” complained Dr. Leo Rebello, another super-scrivener. Several years ago, he helped found the All India Letter Writers’ Assn., a group of 850 perpetual correspondents. Members must have had at least a dozen letters published just to join.

“Whenever I think there is something wrong, I do not sit still. I raise my voice,” explained Rebello. So far, he has raised his voice on paper 2,000 times or so. He says he’s gotten shops opened, trash cleared, milk delivered, phones installed and more for the common weal.

Impassioned debates rage regularly on politics and religion, the two most sensitive topics. Writers quote Greek philosophers, luxuriate in Latin and cite obscure legal rulings. They are “shocked” and “horrified.” They demand world peace and new stoplights with “utmost urgency.” They often are moved to poetry.

“It’s probably the only thing that’s read on the editorial page,” said Darryl D’Monte, editor of the Bombay edition of the Times of India, the nation’s largest and most respected English-language daily. “Next to the front page and sports, it’s probably the paper’s best-read feature.”

That explains why mail poured in recently for what Times letters editor Sylvester Lobo called “a very spirited debate on the orthodoxy of the Parsis,” a sect better known as Zoroastrians and best known in Bombay for putting their dead into the open-air Tower of Silence, where they are consumed by vultures. Spirited or not, correspondence on the issue was closed after six missives were published.

Lobo, who started in journalism by writing letters, gets dozens a day now. Some are hand-delivered to save the 1-rupee (4-cent) stamp, or scented in perfume and sent with a piece of candy in hopes of persuading him to publish them. The biggest complaint? Not enough space for letters; only five are published each day under headlines like “Antiquated Morality” and “Not a Nightmare.”

Most regular writers study the issues carefully, Lobo said. “None of them is writing just for the sake of his own name.”

Some names are impressive nonetheless. A collection of letters published by the Times when it celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1989 includes such faithful correspondents as M. A. Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, the fathers of modern India. “Nonviolence is of the strongest, not of the weak,” Gandhi wrote the paper in May, 1941. “It is a force mightier than violence, though radically different from it in quality and effect.”

Many causes of complaint from a century ago are repeated today: destruction of forests, garbage in the streets, dirty railway stations, cruelty to animals and infanticide. Others reflect the times. A Scotsman tried to sell his wife in 1886. But in an early case of truth in advertising, he warned that she was “my tormentor, a domestic curse, a night invasion and a daily devil.”

Wife selling is banned now, but little else escapes writers’ interest and ire. One letter on Lobo’s desk, for example, solemnly cites an 18th-Century German religious historian’s interpretations of Rig Veda texts, a collection of 1,028 Sanskrit hymns that date to the 6th Century BC. The point: to make a case against--or perhaps for, it wasn’t clear--”an ingenious piece of insinuation calculated to lead to misinformation.”

Such mail is so popular with readers that a now defunct biweekly, Bombay Magazine, hired restaurant reviewer Ranjona Banerji to “concoct letters,” she said. “I had five regulars--an ultra right-wing, a leftist, a militant feminist, a wacky pensioner and a stuffy academic. Oh, it was wonderful!”

There are other fakes. Some real writers pirate Parakal’s name, knowing his reputation for getting published. “There is only one Anthony Parakal who writes letters to the editor,” he said in, of course, another letter to the editor, “and that is me.”

Other writers write to him, asking for help. So have a former president and prime minister, replying to his comments. Ironically, he subscribes to no newspaper. Instead, his news dealer lets him scan the morning papers to see if he’s been published. If he has, he buys that paper. Then come stamps, envelopes, photocopies and other costs, all from a pension of $61 a month.

“That is why my wife is so upset,” Parakal said with a laugh. “Once she even threatened to burn my clippings. She says I spend too much time. And I waste too much money. She says that this money could be used for our welfare. But I worry about the welfare of the world.

“I am the voice of the common man,” he added proudly. “And I have no dearth of subjects.”