about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by telegram – a format favored for its "sense of urgency and authenticity," explains a BSNL official.

But the days of such communication are numbered: The world's last telegram message will be sent somewhere in India on July 14.

That missive will come 144 years after Samuel Morse sent the first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India, telegraph services were introduced by William O'Shaughnessy,  a British doctor and inventor who used a different code for the first time in 1850 to send a message. 

The BSNL board, after dilly-dallying for two years, decided to shut down the service as it was no longer commercially viable. 

"We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones have rendered this service redundant,"

It takes a long time for obsolete technology to truly disappear.