For a brief hour on a searing May morning I am transported to deepest Africa, without ever leaving Chennai. Sitting in the 1900-built Electric Theatre, among the first cinema houses in South India and now home of the Philatelic Bureau, which flanks Anna Road Post Office, I journey to Biafra, once a secessionist state in Nigeria.
Rolands Nelson, a 76-year-old retired Chief Engineer from the Highways Department, who collects stamps of countries that no longer exist, showcases his collection of Biafra in a presentation — among them, stamps of an Igbo mother and child and a decapitated body highlighting the civilian massacre – holding forth on Biafra’s brief time as an independent country between 1967 and 1970.
G Rammohan, an Indian Railways engineer who helped rebuild Nigeria after the civil war that followed, embellishes the talk with his experiences. A presentation by G Anil Reddy on stamps of the United Nations issued simultaneously in Geneva, New York and Vienna, and the latest stamps issued by the Indian Department of Posts, concludes with the introduction of new members, who have signed up from as far as Thiruvananthapuram and Tiruchi, ending with a round of warm hellos to Satyanarayana Murthy who is visiting from Tirupati.
