July 15, 2013.

A photograph on the front page of The Hindu captures the essence of saying goodbye – tears, pathos, and the heartbreaking acknowledgement that that list of ‘what was...’ just got a little bit longer.

There was a sad-smile element to that day – the day that saw the ending of one of the nation’s oldest forms of communication – the telegram.

Now, the Dictionary, so used to baldly deadpanning its way through words, defines a telegram as: ‘a message that is sent by electricity or radio and then printed and delivered to someone’s home or office.’

In reality?

A telegram was a piece of paper that constantly made you oscillate between two extremes: You love Life; You’ve lost faith in Life.

It was a piece of paper loaded with Destiny, often carrying the weight of human hope and emotions and, more often than not, capable of seriously messing with the even tenor of your ways.

Whenever the doorbell rang, and a voice announced that a telegram had arrived, a frisson invariably ran through the house.

Of course, no one understood the dramatic potential of telegrams better than our movies.

Which was why the telegram was always placed right up there as a harbinger of ‘breaking news’, along with those other shock-value favourites – the slow removing of glasses by the doctor outside a door bearing the sign ‘Operation Theatre’ (words which, for some strange reason, always looked as if hastily scribbled), topped by a red light that ominously switched on – then off; and that other favourite, the flickering lamp, which you watched in fascinated horror, knowing something deliciously dreadful was about to happen.

The other memory?

Those ‘greetings’ telegrams that always poured in during special events. For a little extra, these telegrams would be delivered on special illustrated forms, in colourful envelopes,

Remember that perennial favourite?

No 16: ‘May Heaven’s Choicest Blessings be showered on the Young Couple’. For some reason, that always raised a laugh among the soulless lower echelons in the family circle, who always insisted on opening all telegrams that arrived during in-house ‘joyous occasions’, just to see how many people had chosen to send this particular one. The fifty-first was usually met with loud cheers, much to the irritation of the ‘elders’.

You always wondered if anyone ever got mixed up between the numbers and sent No 100 instead of No 16, and can’t help grinning at the thought – even now.

Reaching out – communicating – the telegram was a significant milestone in the human race’s efforts to establish contact.

You recall how, when your children took flight, your mother looked at you with that unique blend of compassion and sternness perfected by Mothers the world over, demanding to know what exactly you were whining about, in this day and age of cell phones, emails, Facetime, Skype, etc? “How do you think your grandmother handled it, when your uncles and aunts left – and all we had were very expensive trunk calls, and, only occasionally, telegrams – should the need arise....which, thank God, it never did?”

She had a point, and you stopped sniffling.

There‘s always been a certain mystique to a message. It has character, a personality of its own; it reflects both the sender and receiver.

And if you think about the history of messaging in general, it is a pretty fascinating, even moving, story of how Humankind, with its inborn need to communicate and stay in touch, has worked its way through perfecting the process... an on-going story, with the tools of communication growing, reaching higher, with greater intensity, than before, altering the ‘scape and scope of Time and Distance forever.

There have been some famous high spots in the world of telegrams: Samuel Morse’s telegram, sent on May 24, 1844, from Washington to Baltimore saying: “What hath God wrought?” What, indeed. Dr. Crippen, one of the first criminals to be convicted with the help of the telegram; Mark Twain, in 1897, using a telegram to issue a rebuttal to the announcement of his death, stating, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.

The shortest telegram in the English language was Oscar Wilde’s. Then living in Paris, Wilde cabled his publisher in Britain, asking about the fate of his new book. His telegram read: “?”. The publisher’s reply was equally brief: “!”.

A thought pops into your head... that whole (possibly apocryphal) ‘Peccavi’ story. How would Napier have dealt with... say... today’s world of auto-correct? Just to find out, you mischievously type in the word, and sure enough, good old auto-correct ...er.... corrects you like a great-aunt, and suggests sweetly that you made a mistake, dear .... you probably meant (hold your breath) ‘Puccini’. Now wouldn’t that have made history ... on several levels, given dates involved?

As far as the sub-continent is concerned, the first telegraph message was transmitted on November 5, 1850.

One hundred and sixty-three years later, it’s taken a good look around and ruefully accepted that its day has come – and gone – and in so doing, has stepped into the world of Nostalgia, along with some other notables...

Like trunk calls... (Ever noticed how really old people still yell over the cell phone? Old habits die hard.)

Or inland letters, in which your grandmother always wrote ‘safe’ on the top left hand corner. So many old friends – transistor radios, gramophones, tape recorders, typewriters – all gone.

For those of us who live in a Wodehousean world, the departure of telegrams is of particularly painful significance. Can you imagine ‘text messages’ flying between Brinkley Manor, or Totleigh Towers, and Bertie?

Nope – imagination boggles.

It’s funny though, in a world where new verbs are being invented everyday – ‘sms-ed’, ‘skyped’, ‘facetimed’, ‘Facebooked’ – no one ever seems to have ‘telegram-ed’ anyone.

A reflection of an older, more lexically-particular time, perhaps?

The way the nation said goodbye was pretty touching. So many turned up at various telegraph offices all over the country, some of them first-timers, sending last-day messages. Diverse people, putting everything else aside for a moment, wanting to be, and becoming, part of history, linked by the simple sharing of a poignant moment. You applaud that sense of unabashed soft sentiment that keeps us human.

So the telegram, even as it said goodbye, did what it has always done best – it brought people together, again.

We’ll miss you, old friend.