Spice of Life: One for the stamp album, brimming with memories

I was on a clean-up mission when I came across the neglected stamp album, carefully tucked away at the bottom of my storeroom shelf. My father had introduced me to philately, asking me not to buy stamps but allowing me to trade or exchange them with other collectors to add that competitive and challenging twist to my hobby. Picking out stamps from letters was the way to go, with a process prescribed for removing them from an envelope, involving cutting out the stamp, soaking it in water and drying it between pieces of paper napkins before placing it under a heavy book to flatten it out.

This hobby brought with it enormous fringe benefits. I improved my letter-writing skills, penning often to friends and relatives in India and abroad, asking them to send the stamps back to me, to spread the word around and be on the lookout for stamps. I pestered my father to help me out by collecting the stamps from his office mail and began keeping track of those among his friends who did not have stamp collectors in their family so that their share of stamps could come my way!

Bit by bit, my collection grew, stamps of leaders, famous personalities, spices, places, history, mythology, culture, festivals, art, animals, birds, insects, from the Indian and global environment made for an incredible variety. Invariably, the number of Indian stamps in the collection were almost thrice the number of stamps of other countries, although the fewer foreign stamps created a niche for themselves by coming in triangular, pyramidal or over-sized shapes with spectacular designs and colours. Stamps from Poland and Bhutan were coveted.

Soon, I ran out of space to stick my stamps and since the ready-made albums available in the neighbourhood were unsuitable, I created a bigger album of my own. I located a stationery shop and soon enough was the proud owner of a thick over-sized book with huge cardboard covers wrapped in brown rexine, sturdily bound together. I laboured for months, drawing the maps of each country on pages I thoughtfully allocated, making notes about the population, area and the capital city. Sticking the stamps onto the album with hinges was as laborious as colouring each map was time consuming. The end of the exercise, however, left me capable of parroting off the capital cities of several countries.

Years went by, being caught up with school exams, college and work-life, I was forced to consign the stamp album to a corner of a storeroom, waiting for me to rediscover it. There it was, brimming with memories so much so that I was tempted to entice my son to continue this hobby exactly as my father had done decades ago.

In this era of e-mails, Facebook and SMSs, I learnt the hard way that I had overestimated today’s ‘WhatsApp’ generation that communicates through abbreviations and emojis. My son took the album alright, leafed through it for an hour or so, solemnly kept it back on the storeroom shelf where it lay forlorn, dusty and unrecognisable.

Alas! The culture of letter writing itself is dying out, but I have made a promise to myself to give emails and digital greetings a rest, and send personalised handwritten letters heretofore so that stamp collectors and albums will continue to flourish.

priyannaik211@gmail.com

(The writer is a Bengaluru-based freelance contributor )