The Plebeian Postcard
Now that Lalu Prasad Yadav has managed a detour at an Indian Institute of Management, one wishes he would change track to the Ministry of Post and Telegraph and infuse some steam into the sorely unambitious postcard. For a postcard is not only what a postcard does, it is also what a postcard can.
I do not know what the postcard’s share in the revenue of the Indian Postal Services has been over the years, but I clearly remember seeing it piled up in ever increasing heaps on DD’s Surabhi programme. Surabhi asked some difficult questions of its viewers but answers poured in on postcards from exotic and unheard of places.
Then Cable TV came, and other shows promising more lucrative prizes, and the poor postcard got an affluent cousin–the competition postcard. Shortly after that those enormous heaps grew smaller and smaller until they vanished.
[Some years later, while admiring the letters section of Outlook magazine I read its editor Vinod Mehta wishing for letters written on postcards. Wo din hai aur aaj ka din hai, the writing space that a postcard offers remains perfect for publishable letters in sundry
periodicals. Brevity still being the soul of wit, it also remains perfect for sonnet, epigram, ghazal, haiku, cartoon. And since a postcard is meant to be posted, the shy or uncertain composer may be induced into sharing her work more freely, and the world might grow a
more poetic, artistic place.
Postcards make for quick and more frequent letters, a development today’s scattered and lonelier familes might look forward to. Postcards are also environment-friendly, unlike the silicon-guzzling computers and mobiles that promise to replace paper. If all this sounds Luddite and nostalgic, postcards hold at least one practical prospect: writing on them may help bring down the average size of mankind’s handwriting. What is large handwriting if not waste of paper?
The postcard admits no attachment, no cover, no stamp. It serves exclusively the written word (or a drawing) and its nakedness spurs a more honest discourse. Perhaps its time is over but there is something to be gained if it lives.
A 1951 law held that “should a post card be posted without the postage having been prepaid in full, it will be forwarded to the Dead Letter Office (DLO) to be destroyed forthwith.” A suitably mass non-violent movement grew against the provision with numerous representations to the Government of India on the matter. In June 1954, the government changed the law, and said that in case of any infringement of rules “the post card shall be treated as a letter and the amount of postage prepaid on a single post card shall be taken into account in assessing the postage to be charged on delivery.” Further, it said, “In no case the addressees shall be given a chance to go through the contents of
such postcards before recovering the dues.”
Millions may still be using the postcard for all I know, but the idea of the postcard in our troubled times admittedly seems quaint. But the quaintness, dear reader, lies not in our postcards but in ourselves that we are human, all too human. The postcard has been saved from the netherworld in the past. All it needs is a stamp of approval.
Tags: Postcard
