Once a staple of authoritative communication across the Indian subcontinent, the telegram has lost too much ground to smartphones.
The telegraph lasted 80 years. I feel a little sad at its final demise but it’s time is over. It has been well and truly replaced.
- Twitter (only 7 years old)
- Facebook (in it’s open format is the same age)
- SMS (20 if you want to go back to the neolithic days).
- iPhone (6 years)
- My son casually chats to people on the other side of the planet while playing online games (Graphical MMORPGs are 17).
There was a time when rapid communication via a telegram either meant something urgently wonderful or urgently frightening. None of the 30 emails I received today elicited either response.