Siddharth Kak reveals they would receive 14 lakh postcards per week for Surabhi: ‘I had to hire a tempo to get the postcards…’

He added, “The postcard would cost around 15 paise. It was a subsidised postcard, whereas it should have cost around 50-60 paise. It was the old method of communication so the government had subsided it. People could use it to write for the pension, send it from a village. The purpose of the postcard got hijacked because of the TV show. We started getting a lot of postcards. We even made it to the Limca Book of World Records. We used to receive 1.4 million (14 lakh) postcards in a week.”

Siddharth Kak also revealed how he once got a call from the Andheri post office that they neither have the place to store the postcards, nor the means to deliver the humongous quantity of letters. He said, “This got symptomatic because I got a SOS from the post office. The Andheri post office said so many postcards were coming in, they didn’t have the place for it and they asked me to come and take it away. So I had to hire a tempo to get the postcards. When the truck reached the post office, there were hundreds of bags full of postcards.”

Kak then shared how the troubled postal department complained to the Ministry of Communication about Surabhi and the ministry had to not only increase the price of the postcard, but also create competition postcards. “I think the amount was so much that the post office complained to the Ministry of Communication that this is for poor farmers, who are these Surabhi guys, nikalo inko (ask them to leave). They then increased the cost of the postcard to Rs 2. There was a team that would count all the postcards. There was one full room to keep the letters. Every week there was a deluge of postcards,” he said.

Surabhi ran from 1990 to 2001. It was initially telecast on the state-run television channel Doordarshan, and later moved to Star Plus in the Sunday morning slot. Surabhi was produced by Siddharth Kak’s Mumbai-based production house Cinema Vision India.