Sending a Telegram your Way

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 -$$

STATUS MESSAGES AND TWEETS

Status messages and tweets have become a part of our lives. People even say that they are nothing but mere extensions of our personalities. I don’t agree with this at all. Well, neither is this completely true nor is this completely false. This is partially true.

The reason I say this is partially true is because of the simple reason that there are some people for whom status messages are actually the extension of their personalities whereas for some other people it is just a way of projecting a personality which they really don’t have. For some others, some of their status messages reflect their personalities whereas some other of their status messages do not. In fact, in today’s times when one has a different status message on Facebook and a different one on their Blackberry Messenger and a completely different one on Twitter, it is just not possible for all these statuses/tweets to reflect ones’ personality unless someone suffers from split or triple personality.

What is clear is that there is a reason or an objective behind each of these status messages or in other words the person has certain expectations when he puts some of these messages. The objective could be hiding a cryptic message in the status which only he or a select few can understand. In such cases, these messages are no less than the Da Vinci code… only people who understand would respond or comment on such a status. The other objective of a status could be simply showing one’s creativity and getting a high by noticing how many people like such a status. Sometimes people put up a status/tweet just to vent out their anger against a person, system, company, society or any other thing. Some other times the idea of putting up a message is to open up a discussion or a debate with others. Sometimes when one has been missing in action for a long time, then just to remind people that he/she exists, a status message is put up.

The reason of putting up a status or a tweet could be one or many but the truth is that each status or tweet desires a conversation as it tells the one who has put it that in this widespread social network, where there are loads of friends, followers and contacts, there are atleast a few who have read what they had to say.

I won’t be surprised if few years down the line psychologists, criminal experts and psychiatrists start analysing status messages and tweets along with the body language to figure out more about a person, but the way body language can deceive, these messages can deceive much more… so lets see!!