Making a beeline for new Bapu stamps

Mumbai:

A sleepy tube-lit room at Fort’s General Post Office has been abuzz with chatter since October 2, the day a set of unique circular Gandhi stamps were issued for the first time. Stamp collectors have been flocking to the philately bureau on the ground floor to grab the seven new stamps that commemorate the Mahatma’s 150th birth anniversary year. “It has been like a fun fair,” says Shailesh Kadam, marketing executive of the philately bureau. Besides their circular shape—a departure from India Post’s staple of square and rectanglular stamps—what adds to the appeal of the stamps is the tribute embedded in their total cost: Rs 150.


Each of the new stamps bears messages from Gandhi’s life in Hindi. If one shows a young Gandhi clad in a blazer, another portrays him working the chakhra. “The stamps attempt to capture a few dimensions of Gandhi’s well-rounded personality and pays a tribute to the colossus,” says the brochure.

Commemorative stamps, as philatelists celebrating World Philately Day on Tuesday would know, are sought-after collector’s items chiefly because of their scarcity. Accompanied by miniature sheets and first day covers, they are issued in limited numbers. For instance, eight lakh of the latest Gandhi stamps and two lakh miniature sheets were issued by the postal department across India which makes the day of the launch an adrenaline-fuelled one for citybased stamp collectors.

Among the philatelists who made a beeline for the miniature sheet last week was Cyrus Sidhva (51), a science teacher from Dadar who can brag a collection of every stamp issued by India Post since 1947 and has even written a booklet, ‘Firsts in Indian Philately’. While the new Gandhi stamps will make it into his next booklet of firsts for being circular—“There have been one hexagonal and two triangular India Post stamps in the past,” he says—Sidhva reveals that the denominations of the new stamps—priced at Rs 5, Rs 12, Rs 20, Rs 41, Rs 22 and Rs 25—contain odd numbers that have no precedent. The new haul has been filed away under the Gandhi-themed section of his album.

For 14-year-old Dhruv Nag, an avid subscriber of post-crossing—the global trend of sending postcards to random software-generated addresses—the lack of colour in the off-white first day cover was a tad disappointing. “It was a bit dull,” says Nag, who prizes rarity and errors in stamps such as the Akshardham temple stamp in his collection whose denomination numerals are missing. However, what seems to have made up for the insipid cover for Nag are the colourful stamps, one of which contains a line that almost glowed off the page for the class IX student. “ Mitra bhaav se rahe toh jagat ka roop badal jaaye”, it reads. “We can change the world if there’s brotherhood among us,” translates Nag.