Sunanda K Datta Ray: An elegy for the aerogram

WHERE MONEY TALKS

An aerogram, more familiar to us as an air letter, from Connecticut brings the sad news that this form of communication is doomed to extinction.

It will disappear first in the United States, says my correspondent, and then, as with everything else, the world will follow suit.

It will be a severe loss in India where our faltering Posts and Telegraphs invest the medium with peculiar significance. But, perhaps, no one was ever reconciled to it.

My Shorter Oxford English Dictionary does not even deign to recognise its existence. It defines an aerogram as "a message sent 'through the air', i.e. by wireless telegraphy" or "a telegram conveyed partly by aeroplane".

Auberon Waugh has a lyrical passage somewhere about the aerogram's invention during World War II for British troops overseas. It was an economy measure, saving on paper and postage.

It made the censor's work more manageable. Given their routine and restrictions, soldiers also found it more convenient. An aerogram was just the right length for a few banal niceties to wives and sweethearts, ending with the word that Tommies made famous: BURMA or Be Undressed and Ready My Angel.

Those who communicate regularly with friends abroad and do not find the electronic mail adequate have a particular reason for being addicted to aerograms in spite of all their drawbacks.

Enclosures are disallowed. The paper is cheap and easily torn. The gum doesn't stick. When folded, it is never a neat rectangle.

Rising costs "" the only thing that defies the law of gravity and never comes down "" long ago overtook the printed six-fifty flying swan stamp, so that a two-rupee stamp has to be affixed.

Yet, the aerogram has one unbeatable advantage over all other forms of communication with the great world beyond India's shores or skies: it doesn't tempt thieves and is more likely to be delivered.

The P&T is in sad disarray. Perhaps it is especially bad (like everything else) in West Bengal and Calcutta. Remittances sent by money order are held back.

Colourful and valuable magazines, especially foreign ones, are stolen. Telegrams are delayed. If Express Delivery still exists, it is far from express.

Postal peons leave letters just wherever they like. No one at a post office is willing to receive complaints.

No wonder e-mail is so popular. Even those who do take the trouble to write letters prefer to entrust their missives to the couriers that have proliferated at every street corner.

They are expensive but quicker, and though one hears alarming tales of packets opened in transit and the contents removed, couriers are, on the whole, slightly more reliable than a P&T in terminal decline. Though a firm believer in John Kenneth Galbraith's theory of post office socialism, I yet believe that this is one state service that has long been ripe for privatisation.

Monopoly rights and security of tenure have brought the service to its knees.

The aerogram stands apart in this jungle not because it is cheap "" eight-fifty against an envelope's minimum Rs 15 "" but because it needs no extra stamps, barring the two-fifty one.

And that is too petty in these inflationary times to tempt even postal employees. As most readers know, all envelopes for foreign destinations have to be cancelled by a postal clerk.

And that can be an ordeal in Calcutta that I had to undergo again only yesterday.

First, the long queue to have my envelope weighed and be told how much it would cost by a surly man who snapped at me and flung the envelope back across the counter, barking out the figure.

Then to another counter to buy stamps. There was a woman in charge and she seemed to have only just woken up.

She didn't have stamps of the right denomination, she didn't have change for my hundred-rupee note, she yawned and drawled and yawned again, not bothering to put up her hand to hide the wide-open mouth so that I could see right down her gullet.

Then back to the weighing man who was by then drinking water, chewing paan and vigorously jerking his leg up and down.

"Leave it there," he said, indicating with a slight lift of one eyebrow, a small pile of letters with high-denomination stamps that the owners had apparently abandoned.

"Won't you cancel it?" I asked timidly. "Later," he said, "when I am free."

It was not for me to point out that he seemed free enough since he was doing nothing at all, but I did, with considerable hesitation, suggest that cancellation was only a minor matter that wouldn't take more than a few seconds, just lifting the seal and bringing it down in fact.

And that it would be nicer if it could be done while I happened to be there. "Why?" he demanded, going to the crux of the matter. "Don't you trust me?"

It was too late for retreat. So I explained that if the postal system ran on trust, I should be able to drop my letter in the pillar-box outside, as in every other country in the world.

It was precisely because confidence had gone that I and others queued up to see our letters cancelled before our eyes. Reluctantly, the man heaved himself forward in his chair then, picked up the seal and did his job.

No such hassles with aerograms. I shall miss them when they go. If they go. I hope not.