The idea to blog on this topic came after reading Santosh Desai’s article on the telegram in the Times of India recently.
The problem is that, despite being on the other side of 30, I do not have any nostalgic association with a telegram. I have never sent any telegram in my life and nor have I witnessed too many telegrams in my house. Trunk calls and STD were more of the norm during my growing up years.
So then the question that should come to mind is that why would I even contemplate blogging about the telegram when I do not have any memory attached to it. The answer to that lies in the simple approach that I take for most of my blogs. I look at the status quo and question it and try to see it from a different lens so that I can give all of you a different perspective to it.
As I kept reading more and more about telegrams and how it used to work, two words kept springing up in my mind every now and then: SMS and Twitter.
So the equation running in my mind was something like this:
Telegram= SMS/Twitter -$$
Let me explain this equation to you. A telegram was nothing but a mode of communication, where one had to be very brief and concise, as each word had a cost attached to it and the more number of words one used, the more was the cost of the telegram. To save on costs, people would do the following:
- They would come up with abbreviations.
- They would avoid the use of complete sentences.
- Prepositions and definite articles were the first ones to be thrown out when putting together a telegram.
- Other than the full stop (STOP), other punctuation marks had no role in the telegram.
So what was done then laid the foundation for the SMS lingo of today, which is similar to what I described above. Even for SMS, the earlier approach was done to limit the message to 160 characters as each SMS had a huge cost attached to it. Soon, laziness and a ‘supposedly’ cool attitude further led to the kind of SMS lingo that we are witnessing today. So if you think about it, a SMS is the modern version of a telegram.
Now if you talk about Twitter, it is another extended version of the telegram, where the character limit ensures that you keep your words limited in a tweet. Moreover, instead of a SMS which is only meant for known people, Twitter is the modern version of sending a telegram to the world of your followers!
The only difference between the Telegram then and the SMS and Twitter today is that one does not have to pay for every word that one uses, even though there is some cost attached to that SMS that you send.
I hope now you understand why this equation has been running in my mind for the last few days since the time, the telegram news has been out:
Telegram= SMS/Twitter -$$
