It’s all in a day’s work for postmen to stamp and deliver letters from all over the world, but what would you call a postman who delivered messages from a different millennium?
The ArcheoPostman?
That’s exactly what the retired postmaster of Dholavira post office, PIN Code 370165, did. And he won the Indian Postal Service Award for his work. Not for delivering messages to the residents and soldiers of the Border Security Forces in this remote village sitting on top of a raised ground, an Island name Kadir in the middle of the dry Rann Of Kutch, but for his work in archaeology.
The remains of Dholavira, a city that thrived as a trading centre during the good days of the Indus valley civilisation was first discovered in 1967-68 by JP Joshi but the excavations have been going off and on since then and earnestly only since 1989. The locals say because of the constant reminders of the postman who kept digging up interesting messages from the past.