START IMMEDIATELY (STOP) TELEGRAM IS DEAD (STOP) In this age of instant messaging and on-the-move live chats, telegrams are obviously obsolete and no wonder, India brought the curtains down on the 163-year-old service at 9 pm on Sunday.
“The service will not be available from Monday,” said R K Upadhyay, Chairman and Managing Director of state-run telecom firm BSNL.Till about a decade ago, telegrams were considered the fastest and sure shot way to reaching news to a distant relative, friend or a business associate.
Most often, the messages were about death or ill-health and hence, the receiving of a telegram could instantly leave a family or relative perturbed, even before the cable was read.
The service was etched in the minds of several older generations by Indian films, which used the telegram in screenplay to announce a dramatic turn in the movie’s story.
The telegram was also the preferred medium for court summons and notices, for the simple reason that it was admissible under the Indian Evidence Act.
For the armed forces personnel, it was a means to seek leave and to announce recall to duty.
But technological advancement in telephony and arrival of smartphones that provided voice, picture and video link on a single handheld device have revolutionised the way half of the country’s 122-crore population communicate.
When an aged parent from a remote village in Tamil Nadu or Kerala can talk to his young son or daughter working in Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore instantly and take a look at their photographs or video clips within seconds of it being clicked or shot, then telegram is definite slow.
Just as the snail mail, as postal services are now mocked at, telegrams too are passe and have been now effectively confined to the history books.
No wonder, several thousand across the country have sent their last telegram messages to friends and relatives as souvenirs and for old times’ sake, and the generation that has never heard of a telegram have got to learn about it for the first and the last time.
It is no irony then that the requiem for the Morse coded messages were sung on the preferred social media of this era -- Facebook and Twitter.Some online posts even imitated the telegram-style to send out their collective genuflection for the messaging service that began as an experiment by the British East India Company in 1850 between Kolkata and Diamond Harbour and formalised for public use in 1854.