Labour of Love!

Minahil Shahab
May 26, 2016
3 min read

My grandfather passed away in October last year-- to date I read the letters he wrote to us during the time that we were settled overseas. His letters are enveloped with charm, character and personality -- they have been my source of comfort.

So thereof Pakistan Post has been a labor of love. I created a journal to record my journey throughout this trip. This journal is essentially taped with an article that I would consciously pick up at every stop. We started at the G6 operational office, I have the classic blue and red ribbon envelope that I picked from the main service booth to account for our first visit. The next stop was the headquarters for Pakistan Post, a brochure and a business card of DG Special Initiatives (who has been the focal contact through the course of the project) became part of my journal. The Deawoo ticket to Murree and stamps that I purchased from the Murree GPO were the next addition to my journal. We made a second visit to the operational office in G6, Mr. Sajjad Bhatti who is the subject of our video series, gave me his pen so I hooked that to the cover of my journal. The most recent addition is a crumpled dispatch slip that was lying on the floor in GPO Saddar.

Murree GPO- A picture of the vintage letter boxes at the museum.

All these remnants from my trip are neatly placed against the letters that my grandfather wrote to me. As the Vice President of Creative and Content Development for our PR agency, I was responsible for generation of ideas and content writing. The first task came in the form of analyzing research and devising a strategy, so I penned down our approach and picked out our campaign name; “Post for a different country”. Since then, I have been fiercely typing words to compliment the PR products for our campaign. For the kit, I wrote the content for our letter, the campaign cards and the comparative rate charts. With the help of my colleague Ayesha, I designed the content for our stamp book. Additionally, I wrote a feature “The man with the one toothed smile” to document my most cherished memory of the Murree GPO, and a press release for a collaborative event of Pakistan Post. I was also responsible for creating content for the website and created the maps for “The post office near you” tab on our website. I also designed the content for our videos.

GPO Islamabad -- Mr. Alla- u- din helping a lady fill out a pension form outside the office.

Throughout the course of the project I was never overwhelmed with the task of writing, maybe because I felt that I was living my grandfather’s dream for me to be a stenographer.

This project was mired with problems. It started with the failure to find any pre-existing research on Pakistan Post, to getting in touch with the right representatives from the GPO to guide us. This one night, I got back home at 1:30 AM since our promotional literature was being printed and had to be disseminated the next day. I was stumped when our shooting footage was discredited, but I managed to pull through since I held on to my grandfather’s advice of being patient. I remember him saying “Be patient and

you’ll conquer the world!”