Mourning cover on Karunanidhi posted

A black bordered Mourning Cover on M Karunanidhi was issued by the Mourning Cover Society of India at Bhubaneswar on Thursday.

It was made on the evening of the August 7 and posted the same day. It was cancelled on the next day at the Philatelic Bureau at the Bhubaneswar GPO and later delivered by the Sahid Nagar post office.

The cover was affixed with the recently issued stamp of Biju Patnaik. Both Karunanidhi and Biju Babu had a very close and special relation.

Mourning covers are black-edged posted letters used in most countries, especially during the 19th and early 20th centuries, as harbingers of death and messengers of grief. Mourning covers and stationery are easily identified by their black borders.

These death related letters and covers are characterized by a mourning mark, almost always black, and have been carried in the public mail system of at least 250 different countries.

Founder secretary of the society Anil Dhir said that earlier covers have been issued on Biju Patnaik, APJ Abdul Kalam, Khushwant Singh and even Saddam Hussein. Dhir has a collection of 5,00 different mourning covers from 180 countries spanning a period of two hundred years.

Out of them, 300 covers have been sent to Tamil Nadu for the philatelists there.