Many of us don’t send letters any more unless they are to the Income Tax Department, but we like to look at the small pieces of paper that are stuck to the left hand side of the envelopes. Stamp love will surely endure the changing ways in which Indians engage with its vast and highly efficient postal system. Anirban Dutta’s A Tale of Stamps, one of many documentaries that will be screened at the Open Frame film festival organised by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust in Delhi, explores the history of Indian philately through interviews with employees of India Post, historians, philatelists and stamp designers. The PSBT production includes a sequence that lays bare the challenges faced by postal employees in the remote corners of India. India Post has 1, 55,000 post offices across the country. In many places, the post office is “the only outpost of the government which is visible”, says Kaveree Banerjee, Secretary, Department of Post. This sequence from the Sunderban delta region in West Bengal might just make you think twice before complaining about tipping postmen at the time of Diwali.
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What did Vinayak Damodar Savarkar think about Dalits praying in temples and eating with Brahmins?
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‘We are living in perpetual fear’: Prajwal Revanna video leaks spark panic among women in Hassan
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‘No educated person will vote for the BJP. What is the point of studying if we do not get jobs?’
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‘One of the greatest statesmen’: When Canada celebrated an Indian prime minister’s visit
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Translated short fiction: A 73-year-old Indian man goes to Bangladesh, his ‘land of birth’, to die
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This new book contains 40 simple lunches that will keep children energetic at school
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View from the Margins: A Miya poet on how Hindutva's rise has scarred his community
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The BJP wants an Opposition-free Gujarat. But some are putting up a fight
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Need more than 400 seats in Parliament so Congress cannot put ‘Babri lock’ on Ram temple: PM Modi
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Start the week with a film: Why ‘Manjummel Boys’ was a blockbuster