DIWALI: A stamp and its well-meaning petition (let's just call it a hoax)

It’s that time of the year again: the few weeks before Diwali when the long-standing email petition to get a U.S. stamp in honor of the festival makes the rounds. As the festival draws closer – it’s on October 21 this year - we at SAJA have been receiving increasingly frantic appeals to circulate the email and make the stamp a reality.

• "USPS has stamps for other festivals too like Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa,Eid, and Chinese New Year. To do this, USPS needs 500,000 signatures to have a stamp release,and so far we have 315900!!!!+ people who have signed the petition..."
• "To do this, USPS needs 500,000 signatures to have a stamp release,and so far we have 323000!!!!+ people who have signed the petition..."
• "Yesterday we had 325,520 signatures... We have a very short span of time to meet the deadline.  Could you please rush the message when you can."

Just how long has the Diwali stamp petition been floating around? I asked the first person who signed it, Atul Apte of Foster City, California (his wife Vaijayanti is #3), but he couldn’t recall when it began.

“I just received it in the mail and I was asked to sign up on it, which I did. That was about the extent of my participation.”

The petition was started by #2, Bob Ghosh, a businessman in Atlanta, and Amitabh Sharma (#42), who wrote the polite and pluralistic-minded appeal to Ronald A Robinson, whom they identify as Chairman of the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee (the Chairman’s name varies depending on the email you receive, as this early hoax detector realized). Ghosh himself was vague about the starting date (probably late 2003), but unlike Apte, he has followed the email petition as it bounced about within the NRI community, occasionally picking up signatories in Malaysia, the UAE, and other Indian enclaves.

The petition has been blessed with some very high-profile names, including Amitabh Bachan (sic, #452) and Bihar’s own Laloo Prasad Yadav (#458), as well non-desi celebrities like Bill Gates (#590), and dead ones like Nehru (#843).

But none of that appears to change the basic futility of the matter. The US Postal Service most respectfully wants us to know that petitions don’t actually count.

“We do not track the number of signatures,” said Mark Saunders, a spokesman for the USPS, which is exactly what they told me last year when I wrote about it for India Abroad, in a famously un-circulated report.

[READ THE REST OF THE POST AND SHARE YOUR COMMENTS BELOW.]

[See SAJAforum's post on Nasdaq Stock Market's Diwali photo]

There will not be a Diwali stamp in 2007. Saunders said the USPS is finalizing its 2008 and 2009 programs.

“We will not unveil next year’s program until near the end of October.”

About 50 thousand people contact the USPS with stamp suggestions each year. Of these, “several thousand proposals are reviewed by the Committee and 20-25 subjects become stamps.”
The USPS tends to be protective of its stamp selection committee – it doesn’t want the process to be overly-politicized. But Saunders had this to say to Diwali stamp-o-philes, several thousand of whom have actually written to the USPS.

“It can take several years from the time a stamp suggestion is approved until the stamp is actually released.  We don’t release information on a potential stamp subject suggestions other than to say the suggestion was either rejected, accepted or is under consideration. 

And the Diwali stamp suggestion, he said, “remains under consideration.”

Read the US Postal Service's stamp guidelines, which includes a mailing address for stamp appeals (text file - Download usps_stamp_subject_selection_criteria.doc)

[See SAJAforum's post on Nasdaq Stock Market's Diwali photo]

Comments

[Jaya Kamlani]

Thanks Arun Venugopal for uncovering the hoax. I received the petition twice from two cousins, and there was a whole sting of email addresses on it, some that I recognized. I went along and signed the petition and passed it on to numerous friends, including Sree and urged you to circulate it as well. Didn't realize I was being taken in along with the 325,000+ people who had also signed the petition. Someone played an April Fool Joke on so many of us in September/October.

Now, if the stamp should become a reality, what a wonderful thing it would be.
-- Jaya Kamlani

[Suneeta Kularni]

I remember reading a new item in Indian Express North American version, stating USPS has received petetion and was giving it a serous consideration.

I was hoping to see Diwali stamp ...