Dear frenzz.....No telegram service from today The 163-year-old telegram service in the country - the harbinger of good and bad news for generations of Indians - is dead. “The service will not be available from Monday,” BSNL CMD R K Upadhyay Once the fastest means of communication for millions of people, the humble telegram was today buried without any requiem but for the promise of preserving the last telegram as a museum piece. A large number people, many of them youngsters and first timers, turned up at four telegraph centres in the capital which have almost been forgotten in recent years to send a message to their loved ones on the last day of the service. “This is the first time I am sending a telegram. It is for my 96-year-old grandfather who lives in a village near Trichy,” Anand Sathiyaseelan, a lawyer by profession, said. A manager in a real estate firm Vikas Arvind said he was sending greetings to his parents in Bareilly. “This I hope they will keep as a memorabilia,” Arvind said. “Hope all is well” and “An iconic service comes to an end” were among the messages sent today. Started in 1850 on an experimental basis between Kolkata and Diamond Harbour, it was opened for use by the British East India Company the following year. In 1854, it was opened for public. It was such an important mode of communication in those days that revolutionaries fighting for the country’s independence used to cut telegram lines to stop the British from communicating. Though started as a Morse code service, the telegram service evolved gradually with the use of computers. At the time of its death, it had become a web based telegraph mailing service using emails to instantly convey message to the other end.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 05:29:20 +0000
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