NEW DELHI: It will be an unusual Monday morning in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ’s household. Among the bagful of mail he gets daily will be several telegrams urging him to ‘end corruption, give us freedom’.

As the 160-year-old telegram service wound down on Sunday, one young man’s idea of sending a telegram to the PM on corruption caught the fancy of others in the serpentine queue at the Central Telegraph Office in Eastern Court, Janpath. The young man fumbled on the PM’s address, and someone from behind yelled 10, Janpath, which, incidentally, is Sonia Gandhi’s address. "Doesn’t Singh consult her on everything," he said, happy at his own wit.

Every one was keen on a slice of history. And the PM was a preferred recipient. Kajal Bhardwaj, in her late 20s, too wanted to reach out to Singh. Kajal works in the health sector and is concerned about the proposed free trade agreement with the EU. Her telegram: ‘Please do not sign FTA with EU. It would impact access to generic medicines.’

This was reminiscent of the Hindu Mahasabha flooding Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajendra Prasad with protest telegrams against the Hindu Code Bill in the 1950s.

Kajal’s mother Kiran Bhardwaj too was having fun. Apart from friends and relatives in India, she sent telegrams in the name of NRI relatives but at her own address. "I will give them a piece of nostalgia and history when they come to India," she said. She even invited a few friends for dinner on Monday through telegrams.

Saurya and Gautam, in their early 20s, after a long debate, decided to send telegrams to themselves. "We will preserve it. The last telegram we saw was in the CBSE textbook ," they said.

Sombre looking Rakesh was at New Delhi railway station to drop his girlfriend when the telegram idea struck him. He hopes it will greet her in Bhopal on Monday.

Inside the office , R P Gond was in a melancholic mood. Since 1979, he has seen messages of love, death, marriage and anger being codified in the dead of nights and misty mornings.

For Gond, death of the telegram will be a loss to history. Where else would you find Gandhi sending out a frantic telegram to an acquaintance in Gorakhpur asking about his son, "Send Devdas’s temperature. Do you see him daily? How long suffering? Gandhi."

There would no longer be a collection of poems like The Telegram Received at Night that made Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet face more repression.