My copy of Sources and Methods, which held the key to how the country’s national accounts were compiled, was decades old. Time to get up-to-date, I thought, and turned to the same person who’d sent me my current copy, when he had been in the finance ministry. Helpful as ever, he got onto the job and came back with the classical modern-day solution: It’s there on the CSO website, download it!
But an official website often promises more than it delivers, and so there we were, trying to figure out a solution. He could get a copy for me or photocopy his. But the problem was in finding a logistical solution to ship it to Kolkata. I balked at the thought of asking him to send it through a private courier. It would blow a tiny hole in his pocket as he wouldn’t let me reimburse him.
The real problem, we both realised, was the post office and the way its great service, Speed Post, remained out of reach for many. The thought of going to his local Punjabi Bagh post office depressed him. It was in a basement, down a steep flight of steps which was difficult for a retiree to negotiate and, worse, even when you got there, you had to wait in a queue for god knows how long.
I could have told him what it took for me to get a piece of paper each from my daughter and son, in Delhi and Chennai respectively. There was this difficult matter of changing their place of residence from Bangalore to Kolkata for their bank accounts without absolutely kosher address proof, a resourceful bank manager had promised to help and all I needed was to get to him a letter from both.
Immersed as grown-up children are in their own worlds, they both told me flatly that a visit to the local courier would have to wait till Saturday. Baba, you know how many things I have to chase in that one Saturday in a week, the two chorused separately. As for the post office and Speed Post, the entities did not exist in their universe. Eventually the two envelopes came, wrapped in neat plastic covers, courtesy a well-known courier service, followed by a sweet email from each saying: Baba, that will be Rs 150, thank you.
How the once ubiquitous post office — it is still there but time has left it behind — had fallen off the radar for most of us! And the tragedy was that it still did a useful job where no other alternative existed. I first realised this when an income tax consultant friend told me some time ago that to get important papers to and from his clients in the districts, Speed Post remained the best bet.
Most recently I myself came to know the indispensability of the post office the hard way. I had to ship a hundred odd books ahead of the rest of the stuff from Bangalore to Kolkata and in utmost innocence called up the office of one packer and mover after another. Although their ads implied that they were movers and shakers beyond compare, they had nothing for me. One said it didn’t look at any load that was less than half a truck, and another quoted a rate which seemed close to that of air cargo.
Somewhat in desperation I turned to the post office website and lo and behold it had a not just a product for me, but choices to boot. I could send it as ordinary parcel or registered or pronto by Speed Post, provided the cartons were firm enough and none exceeded 20 kilos each. So there I was at Bangalore’s Cox Town post office, lugging three heavies, taped up all over, and being treated a bit deferentially as if I was a high-value customer. Out in well under half an hour, with instructions to check at the Kolkata end in under a week, I exhilarated at the bargain bill of Rs 1200. In Kolkata things got even better. The staff put me down as an eccentric who paid a fortune to cart second-hand books across the country, and actually lent a hand in putting the cartons into a taxi.
As I cruised home I mused that we had lost the art and the means of writing letters and sending them across reasonably fast, securely and somewhat cheaply. As for sending something more weighty, like a book or a document, the cost, via private courier, was exorbitant. If only the post office and its Speed Post ran a little better, it could be all things to all, using its vast reach and size to spread costs and underwrite a hundred little cross subsidies, like a matronly aunt who in her ample bosom had a place for all.
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