Coimbatore :

All roads led to the Stampex coin exhibition in Kamalam Duraisamy Hall at Ramnagar here on Friday morning.

Coin collectors, auctioneers, sellers and members of the public thronged the hall to get a glimpse and bargain for coins as old as 800 years and a few rare stamps too.

Coin collectors came from many districts and cities like Kochi, Salem, Ooty, Madurai, Bangalore and even Vijayawada to see if they can strike a good bargain.

Vineeth K, from Salem, who has been collecting coins since 2009, prefers picking expensive coins from exhibitions at Kolkata and Delhi but came to just look for “good grade coins.”

“These are coins which have not been in circulation and so their metal and engraving is still in good shape,” he said as he was looking closely at Re 1 coins from the pre-Independence era.

Another medical student, Ashwin Ramkumar from Kozhikode, who has been collecting coins since he was aged three, came to look for coins and stamps based on medical themes.

“I wanted to create a portion of my collection on medical themed coins and I found them in the custody of a seller from Kottayam,” he said with a satisfied smile.

Though the focus of the exhibition was coins and old currencies, what drew the visitors’ attention were a couple of old postcards and new stamps which told a story of their own.

One of them was a postcard sent by Tin Can Mail to Tonga from Australia. “Tonga is an island on the Pacific Ocean. So people who wrote to friends and relatives in Tonga had to put their letters into tins with names, which would in turn be put into a barrel. The barrel would be dropped into the ocean by the postal ships. The Tonga residents used to collect by going into the sea in a canoe,” says Balu Vasudev, a Malayalee filmmaker and avid coin collector.

“The zeppelin mail postcards are one that used to be sent through zeppelin flights and they were stopped after 1931,” says Vasudev. The two popular stamps were part of a limited edition released by the Republic of Niger in 2011 to celebrate bilateral relations with India. It had Indian gods and goddesses—Ganesha and Saraswati– with parts made of real gold and Swarovski stones.

The exhibition also saw parents bringing their children to the exhibition hoping they will take to coin collecting in the future.

“I think it can teach them a lot of history, geography, biology and politics in a more interesting manner,” said Aravindhan K, who had brought his 14-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter to the exhibition.

The exhibition which will go on till Saturday evening.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Coimbatore / by Pratiksha Ramkumar, TNN / November 28th, 2014