An Unsent Telegram – A Nostalgic Journey

Instead of an unknown scare and anxiety while receiving a telegram that made me feel oh My God  I got a telegram!  I was so sad to proclaim Oh God I won’t get telegrams anymore!

On that day,  July 14th 2013, Telegram got evicted from this country  after rendering a dedicated service of spreading anxiety for over a  century and a half to this great nation. I am very sure the sixty-plus-year-old generations for whom it was part and parcel of their communication in their good and bad times, would join me to cherish this sober moment and thoughts.

TELEGRAM! Just the very word carried with it the pulse of anxiety and nervousness. Today’s evolved technology and digital communications may be instant and effective.  Alas, they are soulless! In no way it could match the human emotions ingrained in a telegram. Those who had experienced the pain and pleasure of a telegram would definitely vouch for it.

After the avalanche of mobile and net, the telegraphic department was pulling on with a skeletal staff catering to the needs of public sector banks, judiciary  and the like for sending  notice to the loan defaulters and serving summons,  as a telegram was considered  to be an authentic  document in the court of law. Of course our political parties used to keep the department busy from time to time with their bulk protest telegrams on various issues.

Telegram got associated with bad omen forever. It was a curse on it for delivering unexpected messages of deaths and tragedies,  even though an enormous number of messages conveying greetings, elected/selected/  births/ successful results of exams, etc were also conveyed through it! The curse of it was due to the old generation’s mindset. They were very prompt in flashing bad and sorrowful news to all their near and dear and keeping  to themselves the enjoyable ones.

Telegram had  almost  penetrated  to the remotest  corners of  our  country. From the taluk post office, a messenger  on a red-coloured  cycle  used to bring the telegram to the villages! The arrival of a  red cycle into a village was a big frightening event for the whole village.  The village crowd used to accompany the Telegram messenger to the house of its delivery. Their intentions were always good to help and console the family that got that telegram as it was ever presumed to be nothing but a bad and shocking tragedy. That was its curse!.

The addressee,  even if well educated,  at that critical moment with so much crowd around would lose his courage and request someone among the crowd to receive and reveal the message. Invariably it used to be a bad news and the whole  neighborhood would start consoling the affected family.

Once in a blue moon contrary to the expectation of all if it happened to be a good  message telegram, then again the whole crowd/street celebrated. That telegram  message would be the talk of that village  till  a next  one superseded  that to erase the old history. A telegram was open to all emotive communication with a primitive  simple technique , unlike the present-day advanced SMS devices that communicate only to individuals losing the charm of open hearing and communal sharing.

It was always great fun to watch the telegraphy operators. At the transmitting end, he would pulse the single key instrument with one finger that generated the tik, tik, tik tik sound pulses.   The other operator at the receiving destination  listened to those pulses and decoded the message and physically wrote the message  to be delivered to the recipients. It was the fastest and only reliable emergency communication channel of that era. At a much later stage, it was improved to type the messages on paper tape automatically.

I always consider the telegraphic operators as Saints with their veins not perturbed by the pain and pleasure of the  messages. They used to perform their job like a   robot and kept their pulses unaffected by the message being coded by them despite its very high potential to accelerate the pulse of the recipients! Even a little bit of human empathy by the telegraphist would alter the entire content and scenario. A well-known notorious illustration is presented below to emphasize this.

A court verdict telegram to the jailor on the last-minute appeal by a convict just before being hanged, “HANG HIM, NOT PARDON HIM” was transmitted as  ‘’HANG HIM NOT, PARDON HIM”.  The convict escaped   the   gallows  on a single displacement of a comma, making  the telegraph operator   virtually  God, deciding life and death

Overwhelmed by my  enthusiasm to register my last touch with Telegram and to preserve it as a souvenir for the younger generation on 14th July 2013 I approached a city telegram office. I was stunned to find a very long queue, of about a thousand standing, unmindful of the rain outside to send their historical telegram messages. I  have never seen such a big queue even on festival discount sales days in big malls! To my surprise I found that most in the crowd were youngsters born in the mobile, email era, whom I was sure might not have seen or heard  of a telegram or its apparatus and technology.

Maybe they got tired of fingering or more precisely nailing messages to their girl/boyfriends through mobile phones and  wanted to feel the joy of someone doing it for them. Or perhaps they  were simply   curious enough to at least have a glance of a traditional tribe that gave  panic attacks to their parents and grandparents,  being  driven out of this country

Sending telegrams was expensive and the cost varied based on the number of words. Hence the focus was to optimize the words to convey the message. So much so, for generations “telegraphy” implied short and ungrammatical. In our school and college days  when we miss a verb in a sentence,  our teachers used to scold us “Do not write telegraphic English”. Thank God they are not alive to see the  SMS English of these days! I am sure they would have shed bloody tears!

Looking at the long line up, I was lamenting to the youngster ahead of me that I should have tried a couple of days earlier. Still busy with his phone, he responded: ‘’FYI this is my third day and IMHO the lineup today is better better”. Looking  at my puzzled face, he  took pity and decoded his reply for my easy understanding.

Being a specially  skilled job  which cannot be delegated to other colleagues, a few available telegram operators found it extremely difficult to cope up with the sudden unexpected surge of customers during the final few days of its operation. Further, the customers had come  with long texts, poems and romantic  letters, defeating the inherent traits needed to be a valuable telegram souvenir namely  minimal words and cost

Little did they know that it was not as easy as that of the cut /copy /forward  process  the  younger generations are used to in transmitting volumes by the click of a key!  The operators were struggling with such lengthy text of telegraphic messages that had to  be pulse-coded.

But all said and done, for the last three days, the telegraph department  and its operators were straining themselves working up late and on Sunday  energetically to satisfy their   enthusiastic customers. They worked with a  lot of pride and joy as if they got a  big recognition in the midst of the digital world.

Every now and then they were informing their families through cell phones “ I do not know when I  will come home, I have too much workload, may have to stay through the night, am totally stressed, I have big targets to achieve, even forgoing snacks and tea, that was earlier my only target ! ‘’

Having got used to such phrases from their IT savvy sons and daughters, their family felt excited to see their  hubbies too catching up to their wards.  Such prestigious feelings of their better halves were always a welcome one,  if they did not expect a matching salary to that of their wards at the end of the month!

I was disappointed that I could not move from the tail end of the serpentine queue to the front, after hours of standing to send a memorial telegram. Ultimately I gave up, feeling  consoled  that TELEGRAM was getting  an  affectionate  warm  gracious and enthusiastic  send-off  by  thousands  of  senior  citizens, youngsters and students  far exceeding  the lengthy  queue of  Rajinikanth’s fans  to watch his hit movie  “ENTHIRAN”

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