World Post Day  

 

Today is World Post Day and I could not resist writing…

 

Last year I wrote about my project during school days when we visited the Post Office at Taluka level. That was the first time (it’s almost 3 decades ago) I saw how Post Office works, and the special attraction was telegram (which is history now).

 

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Universal Postal Union (UPU) and India Post marks 170 years of service to our country.

 

This year’s theme of World Post Day is – “150 years of enabling communication and empowering peoples across nations”.

 

Universal Postal Union made it feasible to send letters across the nations.

 

I doubt whether these days children are aware of international letter envelope which was used to send letters across nations and continents.

 

I have lot of childhood fond memories about this envelope.

 

My uncle used to stay at Germany that time. Hence, especially during Diwali time we used to receive an envelope from him.

 

As kids, we were eagerly waiting to receive that envelope. The reason was the cheque he used to send as Bhaubij to my mother along with a letter. In that letter, he used to mention amount to be given to us (myself and my sister) as Diwali Gift. It used to be a ritual for many years.

 

Then my mother used to reply to him to acknowledge the receipt of letter and cheque. I still remember visiting post office to buy that international envelope. The specific colour bands on the borders of that envelope were unique and that was the fascinating feature of that.

 

With the invention of emails, gradually he stopped sending postal letters. When I first created my email ID (I suppose it was somewhere in 1999, and I created that using internet at college library) I started interacting with him over email and mother used to dictate the message.

 

Gone are those days but memories are still very clear.

 

Those were golden days because people used to wait for long time to receive a letter from abroad and it was valued a lot.

 

With emails, somehow, I feel that we have lost the personal touch and messages have turned into transactions.

 

This season, I am going to send at least 5 handwritten Diwali Greeting cards to my friends. Finally, Old is Gold.

 

9 Oct 2024