Come July 15, and the humble telegram will become history. The demise of the strips of printed sentences pasted on an official-looking paper delivered by the postman will mark the end of an era. The carriers of good tidings and bad (“mother serious stop start immediately stop”, where “stop” stands for full stop) will be given a silent farewell unless enterprising individuals celebrate/mourn the occasion by sending quirky messages a la Oscar Wilde. When the Irish writer wished to know how his latest book was doing, he sent a question mark to the publisher, who replied with an exclamation mark.
As may be expected, the inexpensive and expeditious way to send messages has been overtaken after a century and a half by even cheaper and speedier methods, of which the ubiquitous email tops the list if only because of the virtually instantaneous nature of the communication. Just as the mobile phones have replaced landlines and laptops have sent typewriters to the attic, it was inevitable that the dots and dashes of the Morse code will give way to electronic transmissions.
But, even as the telegram becomes a relic of the past, some of its historical associations will be recalled such as Winston Churchill’s use of the phrase “iron curtain” for the first time in a May 12, 1945, telegram to US president Harry S Truman to describe the lands under the Soviet Union’s control. The first live transmission of a telegraph message was between then Calcutta and Diamond Harbour, a distance of about 50km, on November 5, 1850, and the service was opened for the public in February 1855. In recent years, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd made several technical upgrades, but it was fighting a losing battle. However, the telegram’s legacy will be the use of abbreviated language in SMS messages that are now sent through cyber space.
