Oh, Those Coloured Bits Of Paper!

Stamp collecting is dying a slow painful death, or for all I know, already dead, as the world made a total shift from snail mail to electronic email. I do agree that the convenience of email is a million times more than the older system but oh, my mind so wistfully wanders to the days of snail mail and the joys of stamp collecting when I see the occasional envelope with the inevitable stamps pasted on it, a rarity these days.
The only way to expand your stamp collection these days is to subscribe to your postal service's philatelic bureau or buy them straight from a shop which may not be stamps in the true sense really, just some postal service of some exotic country trying to make some money by printing bits of paper and placing a careful seal on it.
I remember the first shot in the arm to my stamp collection when my uncle who was a store supervisor at the Matsusthita Electric (now called Panasonic Corporation), himself an avid stamp collector in his heydays, handed me all the stamps from his collection of a thousand, of which he had more than one copy. The store he worked at was an intermediary ware house of electronic goods from Japan from where they were shipped to all corners of the world mostly in South, South East and South West Asia. Naturally they had a lot of snail mail, and it was from these that he extracted the colourful bits of paper that reflected so much a country's culture and heritage not to speak of it's history and natural resources.
The next big boost came when I requested one of my uncles in the Sultanate of Oman who was a teacher at the governmental ministry of education, to send me some Omani stamps if he had any. Much to my joy, he went one step further and requested the students in his class to contribute any stamps they could get hold on, for his nephew. The oil boom in full swing, the students who were from all parts in the middle east from Syria to Lebanon, and from Pakistan to Qatar, diligently collected stamps and handed them over to my uncle.
My uncle took the pain to stuff all these in an envelope once in three months and posted them to me; and I had the additional bonus of getting hold of some really grand Omani stamps on the outer envelopes too.
Mind you, stamp collecting is not just tearing stamps off the cover and putting them in an album. For starters, let me explain. You first soak the stamp attached to the piece of envelope to which it is still stuck, in lukewarm water for about five minutes. By the time the gum loosens itself and the stamp comes loose. You need to dry the stamp by pressing them between two water absorbing paper sheets and apply light pressure on them at the same time.(This prevents the stamps from shrivelling as they dry). At the same time you need to make sure that the stamps that you have just peeled do not get stuck to the paper you have placed on which to dry, by shifting them to another paper pad in a reasonable time period. Since I didn't have access to blotting paper this task was the most challenging. And the golden rule: wash your hands with soap before handling stamps, they do have a tendency to attract a lot of dust, especially when wet.
I hope you now appreciate the effort that goes into building a decent stamp collection!
I have a particular grouse againt stamps from the USA, the problem being that the US postal systems use very strong adhesive and this causes the stamp to tear when you try to separate from the envelope. And since mutilated stamps lower the total value of your collection, I mostly discarded them.
And one more tip - if you wanted your stamp collection to increase manifold in a reasonable time, God's own land, Kerala, the land of expatriates was the place to be. Here almost every household had at least one or two bread winners working in some alien land; Indians being attached to their homeland, they frequently communicated with their family by air mail.
I remember, as a child of ten, going to random houses, asking puzzled householders whether they had any letters from abroad, with those precious bits of coloured paper stuck on them, that I could add to my collection.
Some grandmothers/ grandparents who were sometimes the only residents of the palatial expatriate houses , became suspicious of my request and wondering whether stamps were actually worth real money, started refusing to part with stamps, envelope and all!
I still have my treasured stamp collection, a bit less in number, countlessly pilfered by enthusiastic kids who visit our house after glancing through my collection, but all the same, more or less intact.