The Last Telegram

Melissa Arulappan tells us a story about family and nostalgia. In 2013, she went to the Central Telegraph Office in Bengaluru to send a last telegram to her daughters, so that they would have a reminder of a time when important messages came via telegram.

"You know, it was in July 2013 that there was this article in the papers about the death of the telegram. And in some ways, there was a certain sense of excitement, but there was also a certain amount of nostalgia because we grew up with telegrams. Telegrams always came with either news of joy of someone arriving or of sorrow of someone ill or dying.

But I was determined to go to the telegraph office on the last day to send a telegram and I thought who better than to my children who probably had never ever seen a telegram in their lives. It was quite a nostalgic experience just going to the telegraph office. It wasn't the same kind of experience that we had in sending telegrams, obviously because there was a huge queue.

And there were several queues actually. There was a queue for collecting a form, a queue for counting words, a third to calculate costs and a fourth to pay. But it was very nostalgic for me.

There were a lot of people. We were having discussions about the death of the telegram, what it meant to us, the kind of experiences that we had shared with telegrams growing up. And I just felt it was so important to send one to our daughters or send two to our daughters as a keepsake of a world that was coming to a close that day.

I was a bit bummed though when they did receive the telegram to find that it wasn't the same kind of experience. It came much later than what a normal telegram would, nine days or six days compared to a day. It came in an envelope so it didn't come as a telegram and it came as a printout.

But still, it's nostalgia, it's a keepsake for them. And I'm glad they have it." - Melissa Arulappan