CHENNAI: It takes Anup Kumar Goel and his son three trips to get all the ten folders with stamps, postcards and envelopes, in which he has traced the life of Mahatma Gandhi, in stamp form into the living room.
His philatelic exhibition, ‘I am Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’, won second place at the SIPA Diamond competition held in Chennai in 2016, the state-level championship held by TANAPEX in January 2017, and the large vermeil in the Rocky Mountain Stamp Show held in Colorado in June this year.
“I am not a fan of Gandhi, but I am a fan of him in a philatelic sense. This is the first time that anyone in the world has chronicled his life in this manner,” said Goel, whose collection also boasts postcards of various ships made in the year the Mahatma travelled in them.
One of the rarest stamps in his collection includes a proof stamp (only three were made in total) made in Poland and was rejected for distribution. His favourite stamp, however, is the first stamp collection of Gandhi, released on August 15, 1948, to commemorate the first year of India’s independence.
“Although the incident of racism that Gandhi faced in the Pietermaritzburg Railway Station is well known, in 1892 Gandhi was walking on the sidewalk outside President Kruger’s palace in Johannesburg, and as blacks were not allowed to walk on the sidewalk, he was kicked out by the police,” shares Goel, showing a stamp of the palace dated from 1892. Goel also issued a special postmark on April 17, 2015, to commemorate the centenary year of Gandhi’s first visit to Madras.