Philately, the hobby of collecting stamps, is one of the most resilient obsessions that has stood the test of time. Stamps are living documents; they help us know a lot about the time and place of the story that is printed on their faces.
Philately Life explores the history, culture, and arts of the world through the postal stamps of various nations, old and new. The stamps are primarily from my collection and are digitised and posted with a context.
I, somewhere in Arunchal Pradesh
Hello,
I am Purnendu, a photography and philately enthusiast based in Pune, India. As a 90s child, I got into stamp collecting when my uncle passed his old stamp album to me, and another uncle topped up the collection by sending 1000 of his own. During those days, I had a total of two stamp albums, around 3000 stamps of different countries and a few FDCs from the 1960s.
I was fascinated by stamps. They were miniature works of art and could open a window to the outside world for a small-town kid in an era when the internet was not yet known. They could tell stories from distant lands, sometimes in unknown languages, that I could only visit in my imagination. In a way, my stamps shaped my desire to travel and explore the world for real, a drive that would last a lifetime.
The hobby took a back seat when I left my hometown for studies in 2002. The albums kept lying at home and were nearly forgotten. It was only in 2020 that I brought everything back to Pune, where I live now.
A couple of years ago, when I was going through the albums, to relive some nostalgia, the passion somehow rekindled. This time, I did not stop at collecting stamps alone, but wanted to create an online repository of Philately that would not lie hidden inside albums but be available for anyone to see and learn from. This is how Philately Life came into being, sometime in October 2023.
This is a personal project of mine, with no current motive to earn from it. I hope it’s useful to you. Please contact me if you have any questions.
Thanks!
Purnendu Singh