Post!

This was a call that we would wait for, twice a day. The postman would call "Post" and deliver the post. Poems have been written about waiting for a letter from a loved one, call for an interview, or a job offer. In the electronics dominated world this even came to be known as the snail mail, the condescension of the new tech that I did not like! That is not the point of this post.

It is conveying appreciation where it is due.

I remember seeing a letter addressed as below:

Mr. M K Gandhi

India

And that letter was delivered to Gandhi. This is cited to say that Gandhi was so famous that the letter reached.

There is another side to this story. That is, the efficiency and dedication of the employees of the Indian postal department. I will tell you why.

A similarly, but a little more specifically, addressed letter was delivered to my father. The address just read:

J R Lakshmana Rao 

Mysore

This was possible not because my father was so famous that this was enough! On the contrary! It was definitely thanks to the dedication of the postal employees.

My father waited for the postman the next day and asked him how it came to be delivered. He told us that, at the main post office in Mysore, where the mail is sorted, the person sorting mail that day kept this one aside. He then went around asking all those people who collected the mail for the different post offices in Mysore if anyone recognised that name. My father had a large correspondence and subscribed to many magazines and journals. That had made his name familiar to the person collecting the mail from the main post office. He collected it and promptly delivered it to the right addressee.

Even in a small place, a population of less than 300,000 in those days, this was impressive.

I will let you judge if the next incident is more impressive or the previous one.

My first job was in Ranchi - now in Jharkhand, then in Bihar. A couple of friends wrote me a letter. Whimsically, they wrote the address in Kannada script, except the PIN code which, they wrote in Arabic numerals.

And the letter reached me.

This is how it happened. At the sorting office of Ranchi, the letter was placed into the bag of letters meant for the area where I lived - Ashoknagar*. The poor postman, a very young man, carried that letter with him and asked anyone he could, if they could give a clue about the addressee. By accident, he met Munna - the cook my colleague and I had employed. 

He complained to Munna, देखो भाई, कोई मद्रासी में एड्रेस लिख दिया है. कैसे ढूंढू कौन है ये? Hindi speakers - please pardon me, surely there are errors in this. But I am sure you get the drift! The postman complained that somebody has written the address in "Madrassi" - Madrassi being the generic term for anyone from the south of the Vindhyas, the four south Indian languages, and their scripts! 

Munna reassured the postman and told him that his saheb (boss/employer) was also a Madrassi and he could ask him for help. So, Munna brought the letter to me and asked me if I could help him find out who the addressee was.

I was overjoyed to get the letter, the postman was overjoyed since a burden was off his shoulders and Munna was happy he could help a friend.

OK, now. Which one do you think is more impressive?

*The story of how Ashoknagar got the name is interesting. A new extension of Ranchi was formed by converting rice fields into residential sites. Just a few houses were built but no one wanted to live in them because there were no proper roads. The area was isolated and was deemed unsafe for families. A few south Indian bachelors, daredevils in the eyes of many, rented one of those houses and started living in it. One of them was named Ashok. When he sent his postal address to his family and friends he added the name Ashoknagar to it and it stuck! I can't vouch for the veracity of this story but this is what the legend was.