Postal Week: the postmans cycle bell stays heard in official communication and in notes of nostalgia

In this age of instantaneous messaging, the comfortable jingle of the postman’s cycle bell is perhaps rising feebler. Ironically, in some minds although, that jingle solely retains gaining in depth, nearly reaching the resonance of a gong. That is the facility of reminiscences, enhancing the previous, typically to distorted proportions. But nostalgia alone doesn’t buttress postal companies. Belief in its future does that too. As a part of Postal Week, presenting two voices, one on the nostalgic worth of postcards and postal companies and the opposite on its persevering with relevance on this digital world. 

Ramaswamy Rangachari, a resident of Sholinganallur, is a a lot recognised face on the native publish workplace. When he finds the companies on the publish workplace beneath par, he doesn’t flinch from sending out a missive to the powers-that-be. His views on how the Sholinganallur publish workplace might up its recreation have been printed in these pages. If one delved into 76-year-old Ramaswamy’s schooling and profession, this obsession with postal companies would appear out of the peculiar. A retired funding banker, urbane, much-travelled throughout the globe, lived overseas, and extra importantly, tech-savvy, being an admin in a hyperlocal neighborhood group or two, Ramaswamy is a patron of India’s postal companies.

“My mom used to have a financial savings account and a few fastened deposits within the Mylapore Post Office,” recollects Ramaswamy. “After I got here again to India, I’ve been banking with the Sholinganallur Post Office.” For him, the publish workplace shouldn’t be merely about financial transactions. As a trustee of an NGO supporting rural schooling, he personally mails receipts, scholarships, and instructor salaries by Speed Post each week. There is an air of officialdom and ritual about paperwork despatched by bodily mail that can’t be matched by digital mail. And that is among the areas the place the standard postman on the cycle is not going to lose his relevance.

“I’ve to ship receipts of donations by Speed Post not less than as soon as every week. Apart from that, I’ve my very own deposits and different issues to deal with,” says Ramaswamy. 

The unwritten aspect in postcards: reminiscences

Prabhakar V, a resident of Anna Nagar, collects reminiscences in varied types — tram tickets, cash, books, on a regular basis objects from bygone eras and postcards. Many of his postcards have come from Moore Market, exhibitions and on-line boards the place collectors traded residing fragments of the previous. Among his most treasured postcards are two wedding ceremony invites printed on postcards. The first, from 1922, was bought at Moore Market. Back then, a postcard as a marriage invite was a novelty — absolutely, if somebody tried it, it might be a novelty even now, extra so than it was prior to now. There isn’t any additional embellishment however simply the message itself, printed in neat teal-green ink inside a modest floral border. Below, in exact Tamil, the small print of the marriage are laid out: the date, the hour, the households concerned, and an invite prolonged with grace and ritual. 

The second, from 1949, carries an upside-down publish workplace cancellation, a small quirk that fascinates him. 

“Something totally different,” he says. “Something you don’t discover till you look twice.” This 1949 wedding ceremony invitation appears to mirror a turning level between custom and modernity in printed communication. Neatly composed in Tamil, the small print are offered with order and restraint: the Tamil month, the precise time of the auspicious hour, and the names of the bride and groom written with measured respect. A small but putting word seems on the backside in each Tamil and English, “Presents prevented.”