The services of the mobile post office were introduced in the then Madras city for the convenience of the townsfolk who could get time for postal transactions only in the after-duty hours. The maroon-red van with a couple of postal staff in it would start its service at 6 pm from Triplicane. The van would follow a designated route with limited halts. The duration of halt at each stage would not be more than half an hour within which such services as dispatch of letters, money orders, small packets of parcel items and sale of postcards, inland letters, envelopes, stamps, etc. would be carried out.
I have utilised the services of the mobile post office parked quite often on Luz Church Road a little after dusk near Nageshwar Rao Park along with customers waiting to transact their postal business. After the transaction, the vehicle would proceed towards Meenambakkam airport for trans-shipment of mail on the last flight of the day for dispatch to New Delhi. Whenever I was home on leave from my Air Force station, I would see the last Madras-Delhi flight of the day from the open terrace of our house a tad after 11 pm. When posted at an Air Force station in UP, I would find letters reaching my room sharp at 9 am.
They were the letters sent by my father the previous night from the mobile post office. Similarly, the reply posts I used to send him from the Air Force camp post office late in the afternoon would reach our house at Madras the very next morning. So prompt and posthaste was the dispatch and delivery of posts by the postal system through the normal and the mobile post services in the early sixties when the cost of a postcard was a meagre half anna, an inland letter an anna and a half, and an envelope two annas—one anna equal to six naya paisa.
Various courier services, which had their advent in later years, have hardly matched the quickness and promptness of such postal services of the past. The sight of the bulging, khaki-coloured bundles of mail dumped in the corridors of the Railway Mail Sorting Office next to Madras Central station on weekends and their miraculous disappearance the very next day was proof enough for the quickness of the Railway Mail Service of those days. The umpteen courier services that came into use in the later years are no match for the services of the RMS, whose charges were far less and services much faster than the former. The mobile phone, an indispensable possession these days, has now supplanted all systems of postal services.
H Narayanan
Email: nanan2105@gmail.com