Post Offices in India

In the electronic age of emails and texting, we don’t use the post office much anymore while travelling.  Every tourist site still has hawkers selling postcards but I doubt they sell very many.  Why would people send a post card which will take a week to arrive when they can send an email instantly with their own photos attached?  However when a good friend was going to celebrate a significant (ending in zero) birthday I figured a post card birthday greeting was in order.

I bought a post card and found a post office to sell me stamps but had to wait until I returned to the hotel to get the exact address from my address book – another disadvantage of snail mail – yes I know I should have this information on my smart phone.  For some reason the hotel wasn’t able to post the card for me.  (One learns not to question these things in India.)  Bob was making a trip across town so I gave him the card to post on his way.  His errand took him to Chandni Chowk, the spice market in Old Delhi.  While there he asked a shop keeper for directions to the nearest post office.  The shop keeper flicked his hand to the right in the vague Indian way of giving directions and said, ‘Go 20 shops’.  Bob started off down the road counting the shops but could see no post office.  He asked another shop owner for directions who gave a vague wave of the hand to the left and said, ‘Go 10 shops’.  Back Bob walks counting the shops but still could see no post office.  He then asked a man sitting on a plastic mat on the sidewalk with his display of watches for sale.  The man gets up and leaves his ‘shop’ to show Bob a narrow doorway and says while nodding his head and vaguely flicking his hand, ‘First floor’.  Bob enters the narrow stairwell barely wider than his shoulders and begins climbing the 45 degree angled steps while holding on to the sticky handrails.  At the top of the stairs bats were hanging from the ceiling.  

He pokes his head around the corner and there was a Dickensian scene of a row of caged counters and workers behind massive piles of paperwork.  He handed the stamped postcard to one man behind a counter who closely inspects it then refers to a large ledger scrolling down a column of figures.  He closes the ledger nods his head from side to side in the Indian way and hands the card back to Bob.  Bob is totally puzzled and asks how he can post the card.  The man behind the counter tells him to go to another counter.  Bob takes the card to the other counter, hands it to the worker who also closely inspects the card then very forcefully, shaking the whole counter, gives the card a hard pounding with an inked stamp and tosses it into a box on his desk.  A post card has been posted!  

We had another encounter with the Indian Postal Service when we wanted to send a parcel of pressies home to the kids.  We asked the tuk tuk driver to take us to the GPO in Delhi.  First we were taken to a post office in Connaught Circle, the main high-end tourist shopping area, but this office didn’t post parcels.  After consultations with several other drivers and onlookers we were taken further south to a fairly non-descript building hidden by a roundabout in a leafy suburb.  This was the GPO housing about 20 counters with queues of customers (or I should say throngs, Indians don’t queue) in front of each counter and several other grubby looking offices and alcoves.  We couldn’t help but compare this to the magnificent old colonial building that is the GPO in HoChiMing City with its arched ceilings, tiled flooring, polished wood counters and huge painting of Chairman Ho overlooking it all.

Jostling our way through the throng we found out that the parcel post area was outside to the left.  All we could see outside was several people standing around a raised concrete tree surround under a large shady tree.  This was the parcel packing ‘office’.  The crowd of people consisted of three workers and about half a dozen customers.  We showed the workers the bag of goodies we wanted to post and after lots of discussion a boy was sent across the busy roundabout to a drink stand on the other side which had a pile of cardboard boxes on the roof.  He comes back a few minutes later with a box the approximate size for our package.  Meanwhile we are given a customs postal form to fill out, in duplicate of course.  The postal worker packs our things in the cardboard box, takes out a Stanley knife to cut the box to size, seals it up and hands it over to another man.  This man covers the sealed cardboard box with white muslin and proceeds to sew up the edges with white cotton string using deft needlework the envy of any seamstress.  One copy of the customs form was folded and sewn into a seam of the muslin.  We were given a permanent marker to write the address on the muslin, handed the other copy of the customs form and told to go into the building to post it.

Delhi GPO.  The tree on the right is the parcel packing office

We queued up in front of a counter but that counter was having its official lunch break, desktop sign plate set on the counter ‘lunch break 12.30 - 1.00’.  So we moved to another counter with the official lunch break sign stating ‘lunch break 1.00 – 1.30’, hoping we would be served before this counter closed.  While we were waiting a random worker came up and sticky taped the second customs form to the side of the box.  We managed to get served 5 minutes before the lunch break and another successful postal transaction was accomplished.

Time will tell if the card or package ever reach their destination.  You gotta love this travel.  Where else would trips to a post office offer so much adventure?