I have had sticky fingers this week from sticking postage stamps.
I belong to the Overseas Women’s Club of Bangalore, a charitable organisation which produces a monthly magazine called “The Rangoli“.
Distributing the magazine has its own special joys.
Step one is offering the magazines to OWC members at our weekly meeting. Things can get a little crazy. Will I get lost under a collapsing tower of magazines? Or will I end the morning by beating someone over the head with a rolled-up Rangoli? The magazine is popular, so everybody wants to grab a copy, but nobody wants to wait while we keep the records straight on who has taken a magazine that day.
But then, why would they care? I only care because I know what happens next.
Step two is a small team of volunteers stuffing envelopes, mailing six hundred magazines, and delivering two hundred by hand. I enjoy my cycle deliveries, except when walking up to the front door of an obviously empty house. If you see me muttering to myself as I cycle around Palm Meadows, I’m probably saying “why didn’t anyone tell me that this family moved back to the USA three months ago?!”
Step three should involve a franking machine, but the machine wasn’t working this month, so I got the chance to stick hundreds of Indian postage stamps on to hundreds of brown envelopes.
The 1 rupee stamp features M K Gandhi. This image of the Mahatma is different from the one used on Indian banknotes.
The 15 rupee stamp features Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata (1904-1993). In 1929 J R D Tata received the first pilot’s licence issued in India. He went on to found an airline and become the chairman of the largest industrial group in India.
What’s the lesson of this blog post? Stamps are cool? Or just that the more we learn about the hard work done by everyone who keeps our organisations running smoothly, from the chairman to the envelope-stuffers and stamp-stickers, the better.
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