Keeping alive the charm of postcards

A community of postcard enthusiasts is keeping the charm of handwritten notes alive

In early 2015, while browsing through walls of stamps at a philately exhibition, Bengaluru-based Amar Deep Anand came across a counter displaying postcards. This chance encounter took the history buff’s collection of World War II stories to a stirringly personal level. 

Anand now has accounts from a German woman whose grandfather served in Hitler’s army, and he’s in touch with a retired officer of the United States Air Force who was posted in Japan when American President Harry Truman had nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Both of Anand’s conversations, about Hitler’s Germany and the aftermath of the bombings in Japan, happened via postcards. “These are not stories or conversations you’d find in books or movies,” says Anand, the employee of a France-based multinational company, who developed an interest in World War II over the past 10-odd years.

These postcard exchanges happened after Anand signed up with Postcrossing.com, an online resource that helps connect postcard-lovers from across the globe. It was on this forum that Anand first came across Akhil Kumar, a fellow enthusiast and retired colonel based in Bengaluru. Incidentally, this was around the time Kumar was in the process of creating a community of postcard enthusiasts. 

Kumar’s bond with postcards dates back to over 35 years ago, when he was a young officer posted in the valleys of Arunachal Pradesh. At a time when communication with the ‘outer’ world was scarce, Kumar’s ration would include four postcards a month to send back home. 

“Like a scene from the movies, everyone would come out running when someone received a postcard from home. It was always mail over meals,” says Kumar.

A Postcrossing meetup

The credit for establishing postcrossing (exchanging postcards with others registered on the site) goes to Paulo Magalhães of Portugal, the founder of Postcrossing.com. Magalhães and his team are the real shapers of the global postcrossing movement, says Kumar, who now represents the Postcrossing Society of India. 

India has over 8,000 registered postcrossers and Kumar has over a hundred albums. Most postcrossers have themes for their collections. Anand likes to collect World War II memorabilia and postcards of different shapes. There are metallic and wooden ones and there’re the fun, but more expensive, die-cut cards released by the Japanese Postal System called Gotochi. Kumar primarily looks out for the ones featuring musical instruments, birds and UNESCO’s world heritage sites. He has also got a few vintage postcards.

Once Kumar received a set of postcards from students of a primary school in South Korea. The questions on these ranged from whether Kumar’s ‘village’ had elephants to how the sun looks during evenings in India. Another time he had a discussion on India’s gods with a woman in Canada after he had sent out a postcard featuring Ganesha. 

From stimulating the mind and finding new friends to bringing back the lost art of writing, there’re no limit to what a postcrosser can achieve, believes Kumar.

A postcard from Bengaluru

In an attempt to fuel the fading culture of sending out postcards, the Bengaluru chapter of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach) recently released a set of 12 matt and monochrome postcards.

“Rather than a calendar or a diary, which will be used only for a year and then forgotten, postcards have a certain charm to them,” says Meera Iyer, co-convenor of Intach Bengaluru. “They aren’t time-bound and you can keep them as a collector’s item or give them away.”

Photographed by Perumal Venkatesan aka PeeVee, the collection features pictures of 12 of Bengaluru’s iconic buildings such as the Vajra Mahal. As the story goes, the city’s founder, Kempegowda, let loose four bullocks in different directions from the Vajra Mahal. 

He then went to build four watch towers at the spots these bullocks first stopped to mark the city’s boundaries.