Our telegram service comes to an
end without even a proper send off. As per the schedule, Sunday July 14th 2013
was the planned date to stop the telegram service in India or last such in the
world. But because of the Central BSNL employees strike against not to work on
second Saturday, Employees decided to wind up this 163 years old service on
Friday. So, if you were among those who sent a telegram between 6 to 7pm on
Friday, you were also a part of putting the full stop on a story that started
163 years ago.
On Jun 12, BSNL had announced
that it was going to wind up the Telegraphic service because of financial
constraints. July 15 was supposed to be the last day for this, but BSNL
employees decided to stop the service on Friday.
News reports that, there was a
surge in telegrams in last few days. In a daily average, the Central telegram
office sends around 50-60 telegrams. But
soon after the BSNL news came out regarding the disconnection of telegram
service, the usage shot up to 150-200 in a day. On Friday, it was 300.
In India, the first telegraphic
communication was transmitted between Alipore and Diamond Harbour, a distance
of about 50 km, on November 5, 1850. It would be five years more before the
service was opened for the general public. For well over a century, it was the
preferred method for announcing births, deaths, emergencies, interview dates
and even job joining dates. It took two to three days to arrive, but nothing
moved faster in those days.
But our recent technology gear up
swallowed this oldest communication in whole and also people were not having
enough time to wait for something which takes 3-4days.
Telegrams reached their peak
popularity in the 1920s and 1930s when it was cheaper to send a telegram than placing
a long distance telephone call. People would save money by using the word
"stop" instead of periods to end sentences because punctuation was
extra while the four character word was free.
I rarely remember the word
“telegram” in my life, because I never used it to send or receive messages. I was
born and brought up in the digital era, so people of my generation have
definitely missed this opportunity. But I vaguely remember when I was child, my
families and neighborhood people with 40+ or 50+ ages talking about the
telegram message which they used to send/receive for various kinds of news. This
probably means that current generation has likely grown up in middle-class
India without its life being touched by the Ferraris of the snail-mail age. So
for current generation, the death news of telegrams will not bring any
nostalgic feeling, but just be ordinary news which comes and goes without any
hype.
The only opportunities to get to
know about these historic services are from some historic movies or reading
some historic books. Recently I read a book which actually narrates a real
story which happened 50 years back in a small village in kerala, where there
was no development. So Books were narrating the usage of historic communication
which includes telegrams etc.
But we don’t want to put any
tears for the telegram, whose imminent demise in India, following up on similar
winding down of the service overseas, represents the inevitable effects of
creative destruction triggered by the march of communication technology. The
only thing we cannot stop is the advance of communication technology that renders
relics obsolete.
But one thing is that "It's
amazing it survived this long."
Keep Winning,
Madhu
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