the telegram
I was most impressed with the story below and
how it looked at the historical, personal, legal and
technological aspects of the telegram.
I'm always fascinated by the changes in
technology, as I've seen or used most of
them:
typewriter
8-track
cassette
dial phone
VCR
telegram
This also fits into the general mechanisation of the
world that is saving money, but costing jobs.
People in the telegram business have to find something
to do.
more comments later
checkit: Csmonitor
India
to send world's last telegram. Stop.
Once
a staple of authoritative communication across the Indian subcontinent, the telegram
has lost too much ground to smartphones. One devotee is threatening a
Gandhi-style fast.
By
Shivam Vij, Correspondent / June 14, 2013
An
Indian staff member, foreground, of central telegraph office dispatches
telegrams in Mumbai, India, Friday, June 14. The state-run telecom firm Bharat
Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has decided to discontinue the 160-year-old telegram service from July 15, in
India once a source of quick and urgent communication.
At
the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India's state-owned telecom company, a
message emerges from a dot matrix printer addressing a soldier's Army unit in
Delhi. "GRANDMOTHER SERIOUS. 15 DAYS LEAVE EXTENSION," it reads. It's
one of about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by telegram – a
format favored for its "sense of urgency and authenticity," explains
a BSNL official.
But
the days of such communication are numbered: The world's last telegram message
will be sent somewhere in India on July 14.
That
missive will come 144 years after Samuel
Morse sent the first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western
Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India, telegraph services
were introduced by a British doctor and
inventor who used a different code for the first time in 1850 to send a
message.
The
BSNL board, after dilly-dallying for two years, decided to shut down the
service as it was no longer commercially viable.
"We
were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones
have rendered this service redundant," Shamim Akhtar, general manager of
BSNL's telegraph services, told the Monitor.
An
important tool of British colonial administration and control in India, the
telegram is connected with some key moments in Indian history, such as helping the British put down a
popular revolt in 1857 and being the mode of communication with which
Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru informed London of Pakistan's invasion
of Kashmir.
Colloquially
known as "taar" or wire in India, the telegram has been a part of
Indian life, a metaphor for an urgent
message, bypassing the delays of the postal system. Responsible for a twist
in the plot of many a Bollywood film, telegrams were often the harbinger of the
news of the death of a family member. Today, death telegrams, still priced at a
fifth of the regular fee, account for less than 1 percent of telegram traffic.
At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams
were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are
located in each of India's 671 districts through franchises. And an
industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.
One
of them is R.D. Ram, who has been working in the Delhi office for 38 years.
"They will now move me to another department where I will feel like a
fresher [beginner]," he complains.
Mr.
Ram once learned the Morse code technology for telegraphy, but today oversees
staff who type out and send telegrams
over a Web software. He tries to put up a spirited defense of the obsolete
technology in the age of the smartphone, arguing that mobile penetration is
much lower than it is hyped to be. Mobile penetration is indeed a dismal 26
percent, but even in the remotest village, at least someone has a phone.
Ram
notes that the telegram has legal
benefits as well. "It is still accepted by the courts as a valid form of
evidence. And is taken seriously by a judge when a government official
sends a telegram to say he is unwell and cannot be present in court
today," he says.
Sixty-five
percent of daily telegrams are sent by the government. But it is the remaining
35 percent that Ram worries about. A number of telegrams are from runaway couples who marry secretly because
their parents wouldn't let them marry in the wrong caste, class, or religion. "They inform their parents that they are
married, and fearing violence from the family, inform the police and the
National Human Rights Commission," he said.
