When I was in the middle school in the early 1960’s we were living in Dhaka, which was also known as East Pakistan. Karachi, Lahore, and other cities and provinces were known as West Pakistan. My father was working as a Manager in a company and started bringing the postage stamps from the business mail that he was getting in his office, and giving me to keep them and start collecting them. After a few months I began to collect them as a hobby and started exchanging the duplicates with a friend in my neighborhood. His name was Zafar Haider, and we are still very good friends. Detailed introduction in some later blog. With his help I started a stamp club by the name of Oriental Philatelic International. We published a monthly magazine–Orient Ways.
The hobby of collecting postage stamps is also known as philately and the collectors are known as philatelists. Almost all the countries of the world started issuing postage stamps to commemorate special national and international events, personalities, promoting various national and international institutions, anniversaries. These stamps were classified as commemorative stamps, the stamps issued only for the purpose of paying for the postage were called definitive stamps or just stamps.
Philatelists wanted to get these stamps “cancelled” or stamped on the date these stamps were issued or made available to the public all over the country. Initially philatelists were using ordinary envelopes, and when the postal authorities realized that these envelopes could become a source of income, they started issuing specially designed envelopes and dubbed it as “First Day Covers”. This became a hot items with the philatelists all over the world. I have more a thousands First Day Covers (FDC) in my collection. Most of these are from USA and Pakistan.
Pakistan Postal Authorities started a special division in their main or General Post Office (GPO) of big cities like, Karachi, Dhaka, Lahore and named it as Philatelic Bureau. While I was in Dhaka, I was a regular visitor to this philatelic bureau. When I moved back to Karachi, I started visiting the philatelic bureau of Karachi GPO, whenever a commemorative stamp was issued by Pakistan Post Office to get the new stamps and get the First Day Covers.
When the Pakistan Post Office announced that a special set of commemorative stamps would be issued for the 25th anniversary of the Independence of Pakistan, I decided to issue a special First Day Cover from our stamp club. Naturally without enough publicity and resources to make our covers available in other post offices, we could only sell a few dozen covers and could not even cover the cost.
With the increase in my knowledge and interest in philately I started writing regular columns in the newspapers of Pakistan.
In my next blog I will describe the process of publishing my first book on Pakistan Philately to coincide with the 25th Anniversary of the Independence of Pakistan.
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