Twenty-three-year-old Ruchi Ajmera pins up a picture postcard in her studio apartment. She received it from a friend in Bhuvaneshwar. It shows the two friends at a coffee shop in Orrisa. In another setting at the Aligarh Muslim University, (AMU) the postcard is a tool of protest. Professor P K Abdul Azis, vice chancellor, AMU, received 550 postcards last month, all from his students demanding the opening of another centre in Malegaon, Maharashtra . Several postcards carried small, powerful sentiments . The yellow-tinged postal stationery item is regaining popularity. Gone are the days of Bollywood romanticism , when the hard-working hero would send precious little notes from his busy city-job to his beloved in the village. Zoomin, an online gifting portal, gets hundreds of orders everyday, and the Facebook postcard application is a runaway hit.
In 2002, Indian Post declared the launch of Meghdoot postcards, worth 25 paise each. Col. KC Mishra, SVM, postmaster general, Pune, says, "The movement marked the reincarnation of the postcard. Today, it's to-the-point communication possibility is being used to go beyond its traditional use."
The story became more interesting when in 2010, author and illustrator Vishwajyoti Ghosh launched his book, Times New Roman and Countrymen . The book is a collection of 25 postcards and tries to deconstruct the image of India as popularly defined by Bollywood. One could tear away the postcards and use them. "I wanted to create a body of work which would travel more than a book. The post card has an advantage of reaching out. It is a conventional mode of communication which has stood the test of time. It definitely has a reach, it is trendy and funky and more than anything the picture postcards offer a visual idiom," says Ghosh.
Pratisad Neurgaonkar, from the International Collector’s Society of Rare Items, Pune, owns an enviable collection of postcards dating from 1857 to the present. These include a commemorative postcard for Queen Victoria, several picture postcard varieties depicting Kashmir and some government declarations. Neurgaonkar is hopeful the postcard's new avatar will sustain.
Adding a dose of social awareness to this resurrection story are the NGOs. CRY organised a postcard campaign last month on the occasion of International Literacy Day. Through essays and drawings on these postcards, one thousand children from various government schools across Maharashtra and Gujarat expressed what their wishes. These were later displayed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai.
Source : http://www.indianexpress.com
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