Now, telegram runs out of patronage and use
One hundred and sixty three years after William Brooke O' Shaughnessy, a young Irishman employed by the East India Company, used an electric telegraph line on Indian soil to send a message from what was then Calcutta to Diamond Harbour, the last telegram in this country will be booked on July 15. After that, Bharat Sanchar Nigam limited will shut down the service.
That will mark the end of an era — an era of postmen, their satchels and tinkling cycle bells, of urgent messages expressed in short, curt sentences ending literally with the word S-T-O-P. The news of the telegram's death, of course, does not come as a shocker — quite unlike, perhaps the manner in which the telegram itself delivered news which by virtue of the fact that it was always ‘urgent’ was received with anxiety and trepidation. But the telegram service has been comatose for many years now. At the peak of its service years, as many as 1,00,000 telegrams would be sent in a single day from the main office in Delhi alone. Today, all stations across the country put together do not send out as many in a day. No wonder that BSNl shut its overseas telegram service two years ago, and nobody really noticed.
In fact, much of young, middle-class India today has never sent or received a telegram in their life-time. Those of the earlier generation, who are familiar with this ubiquitous, epistolary method of communication, will miss it for nostalgia’s sake. In the age of emails and SMSes, the telegram had long since lost its utility. Yet, it was once at the forefront of communication technology and will always be remembered as the cheapest and quickest means of communication that connected all of India in one huge swipe. In fact, when the first telegraph lines criss-crossed the country from Calcutta to Agra to Madras, they were viewed as the harbinger of modernity — but not before being looked upon with suspicion as a symbol of imperial rule. Indeed, it is commonly believed that the telegram played an important role in helping the British crush the Indian rebellion during the 1857 First War of Independence — interestingly, in much the same way that social media fuelled the Arab Spring of today across countries.
Of course, the telegram is not the only one to be left behind as time and technology march ahead. In the US, for instance, the Government is already shutting down several post offices across the country, especially in rural areas, to reduce workdays at these offices. It is scrapping services, as snail mail loses its relevance in the age of Internet communication. In the process, the art of letter writing, for instance, is already dying a slow death across the world. People no longer have the inclination or possess the craft that is needed to pen carefully worded letters of the kind that Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to his peers and also daughter Indira Gandhi. The ‘Phool tumhe bheja hai khat mein’ and the ‘Dakiya dak laya’ days are gone. lingering intimacies are a thing of the past.