The Postcard is Dead. Long Live the Postcard

There was a time when the wheels of planet Earth chugged on slowly but steadily, when foreign travel was a rarity and when postal mail travelled the oceans to reach its destination. Then air travel shrunk our planet but till the ‘70s and ‘80s, foreign travel was a distant dream for most people. For much of the 20^th Century the postcard reigned supreme and its novelty treasured.

Let’s fast-forward to the new millennium. Foreign travel has become common place and air-mail has now been rechristened as snail-mail. In the run-up to the warp-speed change that is so characteristic of our era, the biggest casualty has been the postcard of yesteryear.  When was the last you sent or received a picture postcard from a friend or family member?

A picture is meant to convey a thousand words. So, why should it matter that the fabled postcard is now replaced with Instagram or the several alternative social media channels that have sprung up? For one, the postcard was a personal message intended for a specific recipient unlike an Instagram post which is targeted at hundreds or thousands of followers. Second, sending a post card meant making a special effort to buy one, then to write it out, to purchase stamps and finally make the effort to drop it off at the nearest post box or visit the post office. It meant using your head, limbs and heart at one go. Third, there is an unmistaken beauty in scarcity which disappears when something coveted is taken for granted and this something is coming out of our ears all the time.

Strange as it may sound, I have collected all postcards I received from my school days. It never occurred to me once to discard these despite not having a collectors mindset. Here I present a curated collection of some charming pictures each embedded with a unique story.

In August 2000, my father was visiting Alaska for the second time. This time, he took my mother along and they signed up for an Alaskan cruise.  Here is a postcard my father wrote whilst on the cruise invoking me and my family to visit this beautiful region. Placed in the lap of nature, Alaska conjures up images of mountaineering, polar bears and adventure. And of course, Alaska is mired in Russian and American history. With the gold-mining rush that occurred after the Russians sold Alaska to the Americans, I wonder if the Russians are scratching their heads in regret.

In the summer of 1978, a school classmate, Sunil and I made our maiden voyage abroad. It was at a time when my sister, Rekha was settled in Munich. Rekha had a friend who owned an unoccupied villa in Weggis on Lake Lucerne, Switzerland and offered it to us for a vacation within a vacation. Sunil, Rekha and I had a marvellous time. Earlier this year, Sunil passed away and it brought back memories of the postcard he sent me on revisiting Weggis in July, 1990. In this postcard he is enquiring whether I retained any film negatives from our 1978 visit. I gathered recently that he had made one more visit to Weggis after 1990. Such is the magic that travel can create.

In July 1993, my sister Rekha and her husband, Horst visited Amsterdam and sent us this beautiful card writing “It’s a real pity that you’ll are not here with us in lovely Amsterdam.” It is a great pity indeed because even thirty-three years later we haven’t visited Amsterdam despite having a very good friend there. Amsterdam is on my bucket list.

Whilst undertaking my graduate studies at Boston University in 1981, I had the great experience of spending my first year in a university dorm. In May 1990, my dorm mates, Donna Marie (from New York state) and Stephanie (from Germany) sent me this postcard from the Museum of Fine Arts, celebrating Stephanie’s visit to New York and reminding me of her fondness to visit the United States.

This postcard dated June 1975 is from Peter, a pen friend whom I got acquainted three years prior and someone who I met in person for the first time only three years later. Peter’s message in this postcard dwells on an intricate mosaic that appears in a 11^th century Byzantine church in Greece. Hailing from New England, Peter writes about encountering hot weather in Greece which now seems to be spreading all over Europe every summer.

Most of the postcards I have received over the decades have been from people visiting overseas but this one is very special. It’s a postcard from my Boston University classmate Fabrice and it was mailed from Belur in Karnataka, India. Belur and Halebid are UNESCO World heritage sites and for someone who has visited the historical temples here, I can vouch that the architecture here is on an altogether different plane. Fabrice writes” I would be soon a specialist of India if only this country was less immense and complicated.” I received this postcard in circa 1993 so I am guessing that Fabrice is by now an India pundit. Perhaps he has a lot to teach me.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this article and feel even slightly inspired, make sure to send your friend or a loved one a postcard the next time you set out on a holiday. I am not saying you should renounce your Instagram account. Rather I beseech you to realise that old and new can comfortably co-exist. Now, wouldn’t that reality be a great unfolding?

Feature image: Postcard received from Fabrice whilst visiting the Gulf of Siam, Thailand in Jan 1988

Shakti Saran is a systems thinker, writer, consultant, and the Founder of Shaktify, an initiative to power changemakers