India's Telegraph, Once Gandhi's E-Mail, Stutters to an End

It was the text-messaging service of its age, an invention as awe-inspiring in its time as electricity, flight and the moving image.

For more than 100 years across the 19th and 20th centuries, its gnomic messages, worked into Morse code and out into language again, then delivered by postmen, connected human beings in faraway places. It announced births, marriages and deaths; called soldiers home from war or announced their demises to their families (or changed the course of the war itself); confirmed job offers or remittances to anxious and impatient souls. The voice of history whenever it was in haste, it was stoic by nature -- concealing waves of emotion under its impassive, attenuated syntax -- and easily available to rich and poor, in city and village.