It was quite a shock for employees of the Central Telegraph Office in Fort when they first heard from the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited about the closure of telegraph services on July 15. “Could it be true?” they asked each other, silently as they looked at each other in disbelief.

“No intimation, no discussion. Nothing. Just a plain stop,” recalls Senior Telegraph Master, CN Deshmukh. For him, it was like a death telegram. Curt and straight to the point. In his 38-year-career, he has cleared several death messages without batting an eyelid, but today, it feels different, and so does it for 300 of his colleagues at the CTO.