If someone was to ask me two things that connects civilizations and make all the development happen in the modern world, I would say they are roads (or rivers in ancient times) and reach of a postman.
Rivers and roads because water being the most essential commodity for sustenance of life, the nomads moved along rivers and other water bodies and created settlements around them. From Harappa to Mohen Jodaro to Babylonian to any other ancient civilization, all of them have been found around water.
Roads because there is a limit to which a human being can travel on unpaved paths. Even with help of animals carrying humans (and assorted goods), there is a limit on the reach and replenishment. Moment roads (or paths or pagdandis as they call them in India) came in, suddenly trade became possible. People got more creative, found new ways of making money and settled along these roads. Trade, commerce, cultures, information, intellect etc. all moved along these roads. Silk Routes and Hippie trails are more popular examples of how trade and cultures moved along roads and how civilizations were developed.
Postmen because until communication happens, everything from trade to knowledge to entertainment all goes for a toss. When you want to sell, you need some kind of communication medium that enables transactions and exchange of ideas. Since people are always moving from one settlement to another, you need some kind of communication medium to enable everyone to stay in touch. We might argue that now we have ubiquitous telephony and omnipresence of Internet but there is a certain charm to a letter that a phone call or email lacks. The handwriting, the effort that goes in writing the letter, the concept of a permanent address, the planning that it takes to send a letter, the wait for a letter, the stamps and the concept of collecting them, the envelopes, everything is very very mesmerizing. I still write and love to get hand written letters. There is something about letters and concept of postal system that mesmerizes me - I cant pin point what exactly draws me towards postal system but I know I have to do something about it.
And after this longish preface, here is the introduction to my Discovery of India. The Indian postal system is the largest in the world with about 1,55,333 post offices (wikipedia).
Every territory in India has been assigned an unique postal identification number or PINCODE as we know it. Each post office has its own PINCODE and my Discovery of India idea is that we go around shooting each post office, their identifications plates (the one shown above), talk to people around there and write a 500 word note on that region. There are more than 1 lakh post offices and the task is a mammoth and seems very challenging. But it should be awesome fun. While doing it, I would be traveling. Taking pictures. Talking to people. Reading more about a place. Writing. Blogging about it. All the things that I love doing.
The end result might look like a photoblog or a coffee table book or website or something that I mash with the map of India. Its still a fresh idea and I am wondering if anyone would have more ideas on how to go about it?
UPDATE: We now have a FB group for it. Please join and invite more people.
Image credits: Rahul via Flickr
