r/PostcardIndia

Hi everyone,

I’m Lena from Belgium, and I’m looking for postcard swaps with people who would be willing to write something on the card in their own language/dialect/alphabet.

It can be a personal message, a fragment from a book or poem, or simply something beautiful or ordinary from daily life that you want to tell me about. I love looking at different languages (even if I don't speak them), alphabets, scripts and handwriting styles, all of them unique expressions of a certain place and culture.

In return, I can send you a postcard from Belgium with something written in Flemish or even the dialect of my regio,, if you like 😊. I have lots of different themes of cards to choose from: city views, art/history/archaeology, photography, botanical, anatomical, Harry Potter, Japanese woodblock prints...

I also love beautiful stamps and always put care into the cards I send.

Feel free to DM me if you’d like to exchange addresses.

So yesterday, I visited my post office HO for some stamps and the person showed me a special stamp. It was a colourful circular shaped paper with 5 square stamps cut out in it. Each of those 5 stamps had value of Rs 55 written on them. The executive said that the whole circular stamp costs 55 and if I want to use it, I have to attach all 5 stamps to the letter/envelope.

Is this true, or is the value of each stamp is 55 and in total the value of whole circular paper in which these 5 stamps are is 275? The reason I am asking is because no one in the post office in my city knows anything about ordinary post. The oldest person over there has been working for the last 10 years and he has never seen anyone use ordinary post.

I’m from Pune, Maharashtra and I’ve been using for around 18 months now. So far, I’ve sent 13 postcards and all of them reached their destinations correctly. The problem is — I have never received a single postcard myself through Postcrossing.

I’ve also done many direct swaps through Instagram, WhatsApp groups, and Reddit. Still no luck for a very long time.

I tried a lot of things for this issue:

Sent postcards to myself

Sent envelopes to my own address

Tried yellow postcards as well

Checked multiple times with my local postman

Confirmed that my address is correct

Recently, I filed an official complaint online about missing mail, and right after that, I finally received my first-ever postcard from a direct swap on May 4th. The cards I received were domestic (within India), but I still haven’t received any international postcards that were supposed to come through Postcrossing.

I just wanted to ask:

Has anyone faced something similar in India?

Is there anything else I can do to make sure international mail gets delivered correctly?

Do post offices keep undelivered international mail somewhere, or is it eventually discarded/returned?

Is there any way to recover older undelivered postcards?

Would really appreciate any advice or information from people who’ve dealt with similar postal issues.

I am sure this has been asked many times, but I have never used ordinary post. I have recently started writing letters and this is the first time I am using India Post Ordinary mail service. The reason I am asking is that I have seen a few posts saying that letters are not delivered or they get lost or get delayed for a long time. What is your experience about this? Is there anything I should know about this or take any precaution?