Khidmat, Dayanat Amanat.

My mom thinks I've been doing PR for Pakistan Post even before I knew what I was doing.

Pakistan Post was there when I was a tiny eleven-year old who wrote her first article on a blank A4 page and needed to send it to DAWN's Young World. It was there when DAWN published the piece and the articles that followed, sending me small cheques - my first earnings, all of which Pakistan Post assisted me in receiving. There were also letters exchanged between two strangers who became friends. So strong would our friendship be that even before I had gotten my acceptance letter from NUST, my friend would have seen me on campus in a dream. We posted each other letters throughout the years and the last thing she posted me was an invitation to her wedding.

"Write to me from your new address," I told her the day she got married.

So when I saw that Pakistan Post was getting flak, I knew I had to do something about it.

For a PR project, I soon found a group of like-minded people who thought working with Pakistan Post was a good idea. While on our own end we tried to divide the work and make sense of it all, there was a genuine sense of this being a sinking ship that we were trying to salvage. It was sort of like finding ruins and pointing out the potential they still carried. Our choices weren't popular; this wasn't a hipster trend we were trying to revive - we didn't try to romanticise the notion that handwritten or typewritten was vintage, classy, and aesthetically sound. We were trying to help out an institution which had helped so many people. We were saying that these post offices are still relevant for people, even if they don't come from the same economic bracket as you do. That because its services were affordable, it didn't mean they were somehow inferior in their quality.

Since I had pitched the idea for Pakistan Post, I was elected in-charge of creativity. Which, to be fair, was something my team at Papyrus was not lacking in. I found myself being reached out to for approval of ideas which were so genuinely good that I didn't even understand why I was even being asked to give the green signal. I took on the role of the editor, proof-reader, and writer for Papyrus. The real challenge was writing the feature article on the Murree GPO since I had little experience with describing architectural elements and was worried about accuracy. Shout-out to my architecture friends at NUST who took out the time to run through the photographs I had taken, writing notes that helped me research.

At the time of writing this, there's still a week to go before we wrap up what we've done. I've now seen Pakistan Post more intimately than ever before. I've now gone behind-the-scenes. It has not failed to impress.