Tribute to the Telegram service retiring on the 15th of July

This morning during my mundane daily routine of catching up on the headlines in the newspaper, I ran into one particular news article that caught my attention. It is about the discontinuation of Telegram service in India. Smart phones, emails and SMS seem to have pushed the humble telegram service to a quiet corner with the BSNL deciding to discontinue the 160-year-old telegraph service from July 15.Although I have not used this service even once in the last two decades, I felt sad and felt that something that was part of my childhood is being taken away from me. A sense of panic has struck me that world is moving on and I took a trip down the memory lane.

I remember while growing up in Tenali, we would dread receiving a telegram especially in the wee hours. Most of them read  "xxxx serious start immediately", "xxxx expired on xxxxx", "father not coming on Saturday", etc. And there were others that read “BSRB interview on xxxxx in Delhi”, "Aunt arriving on Saturday via Madras Mail, please receive at station", etc. There were other kinds of messages, mostly congratulatory messages from family and friends. I remembered my visits to the telegraph office to send a message and the struggles to shorten the message without losing the context as the rates were dependent on the number of words. By the time, I turned ten or twelve, memorized their entire rate chart to Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Lucknow, etc.

Now we have come quite far from Telegrams to whatsApp messages. While the modern technologies made information accessible to people at a rapid pace, I wonder will they ever be able to match the emotions of excitement, surprise, anticipation, etc created by telegrams and postal letters.

Whatever may be the reason for discontinuing, I salute this service and the people who worked to deliver the messages from one corner of the world to the other corner with the realities of poor infrastructure.