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.
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