Thacker's and Harry's

================================================

At my alma mater(Andhra University, Waltair) the only English-sounding landmark was 'Erskin Square', a magnificent Open Air Theater within a Quadrangle in the Biology Building.

But when in 1965 I set foot on the soil of Golden Bengal I heard more than my fill. 'Splanade, Dalhousie Square, Victoria Memorial, Theater Road, Park Street, Amherst Street, Flurry's, New Market, New Empire, Light House, Metro..an unending list. Bristling with the Raj relics.

In the backwaters of the Desi Hijli, even IIT KGP boasted of two: Thacker's and Harry's.

At first I thought Thacker is a distant relative of William Makepeace Thackeray, whose Vanity Fair was popular at our English Department at AU.

But lo! and behold!: I was told the grand-old Thacker's original Gujerati name is: 'Takker'. Cosmetic Enhancement. Thacker's is the bookshop at the Tech Market, as old as IIT itself (around 60 years). It is one of the first shops (apart from Saha's selling broomsticks) visited by Freshers on Day 1. And for as long as they are there.

I knew the grandpa Thacker, who had a branch in Gole Bazaar, selling school books and stationery. A grand-old man. I am told there is one outlet in Calcutta too. By the time I left KGP in 2005, it was being manned by his grandson Mohinder & his wife and occasionally his daughter. When I visited the shop last (January 2010), all of them were there and I got a grand welcoming smile. I could guess that, like me, Mohinder is a grandpa too.

The smile is extra-special. When a Jumbo Course for 500 freshers was thrust on me and RSS, we decided that we would write up a 250-page Lecture Notes & Problems Bank and get 500 copies printed in time for the arrival of the First Year kids. The idea (as all my ideas are) is based on the Principle of Least Action. We would announce in the very first Class that they should go and buy this Book at Thacker's and not come to the Jumbo Class. Attendance would not be taken and the book has everything we are going to display on the white screen by OHP.

The thing worked wonders. After a couple of classes, the Class strength fell from 500 to a cozy 100. Only those gunning for the President's Gold Medal, and Quislings desperately trying Branch-Change used to attend the Class. And they were all ears and eyes.

We had just 8 months to write the book. And Mohinder promised to deliver the 500 Offset printed bound copies on dot. Which he did. We were relieved. And he priced them on a 'no-loss no-profit' basis at the ridiculously low-price of Rs. 100. I was very happy and asked him why he should take all the trouble if he isn't going to make a single Rupee out of it (RSS & me did it for free).

He smiled and said: "Sir, we will use your book as Advertisement. Freshers come with bundles of their doting father's cash in their bulging wallets. If you announce in the Class that they have to buy this book at Thacker's, they would flock to my shop and would be lured into buying everything else from pens, khatas, Calculators, PT sheets etc, which I will price so that I can more than make up!"

There you are...Mohinder didn't get an MBA from Harvard Business School. Like the Dabbawalas of Bombay he can teach MBAs a trick or two.

[A word about PT sheets: As soon as I joined IIT KGP I was dismayed by students calling Bond Papers of a certain grade by this weird name. I unraveled this mystery. "One has to ASK!" (as Feynman said in a very different learning context). Then on, whenever students in my Lab Classes used 'buying PT sheets' as the bahana (excuse) for going out for chai and gupshup, I used to tell them that I would let them go if they tell me what is PT about those sheets. None could. Neither did I leak the answer: At first, as the Holy Bible would have it, there was this Production Technology Lab manned by an American Guest Professor, who insisted his students write up their Lab Reports on good quality Bond Papers rather than 'Shilpi Khatas'].

Then comes Harry's. In 1965 there was this Petrol Pump at the heart of the Campus. The Hoarding proclaimed: "S. D. Harry's Filling Station". But was manned by a Dhoti-clad Bengali Bhadralok. By then I was curious about names of places, people and things. I got to know that it is the Cosmetic Enhancement of the owner's name:'Hari Das Sur'. Beat that!

There were a few scooters and a car or two then, but the Route Buses used to ply by his Petrol Pump and he made his monopoly pie. After the death of the owner I guess it changed hands and became:'Swapan Filling Station'. After the By-Pass Ring Road was built and buses ceased to ply, it was dislodged from the Campus and the open space became a cute Parking Lot.

Very few students knew that Harry's was actually a Petrol Pump. It was like this:

In 1965 when I was living in the Faculty Hostel, the food was unbearable. So, promptly at 5 PM we used to jump the fence and sit in droves in a ramshackle shed manned by a charming man known as Nandida, with his six sons ranging from ages 12 to 1 (the 1 was called Tikka) with all of whom we used to play soft-ball cricket. Why 'Tikka', I don't know. The only Tikka I knew was the Ace of Playing Cards. Maybe a connection there. Nandida had a worker under him who was a specialist cook in Rasogollas and hot hot Singaras (he had a utility hobby...snake catching). We were so famished that we used to order and eat on the fly at least half a dozen Singaras each.

Nandida suddenly passed away and the worker who came to be known as Dadu took care of the family and the shop. The first thing he did was to shift shop in front of Harry's Petrol Pump: a mobile Chai Dukan making its profits in Paan and Cigarettes (again the practically free Chai was the bait). As the kids grew up and became a dozen working hands under the tutelage of Dadu, the thing flourished and grew by leaps and bounds and diversified.

At the end of 3 decades, Harry's vanished but the Chai Dukan became the folklore Harry's: a fenced-in huge semi-permanent structure, with lots of lawns on which dollops of IITian boys and girls used to sit and lie down reveling in Birthday Bashes, Placement Parties, Endgame Photo-ops and the like; all watched by bunches of their Professors smoking on cement benches and gossiping. A large happy family as it were. And Tikka who inherited this Papacy was the Pope, serving Holy Chai, Singaras, Sweets and Cool Drinks.

We old fogs called it 'Tikka Dukan' but students used to refer to it as 'Harrys', not knowing why. For 3 decades and more the cement benches were haunts for my Woolgathering.

This Tikka Dukan (Harry's) has a special thing for me:

One evening around 1995 myself and DB were sitting on one of the cement benches and gabbing just after I took my Relativity Class. A large group of students entered via the turnstile and one of them, Sougato, left his friends and approached our bench (later he turned out to be DB's Project Student). He then posed me a riddle. Off hand I said something which apparently satisfied him (I knew him from his age 3). But I was inwardly dwelling on it and knew that if some effort is put, it would be publishable (I had a nose for these things...any doubt of an IIT student that took more than 2 hours for me to address has the germ of a publication in AJP, EJP or such).

It took 5 years and more, and newer and newer authors and an M Sc Thesis filled with Computer Programs and Graphics before it appeared in print:

====================================================

"Tippe top paradox in relativity", European Journal of Physics, Volume 23, Number 3, Page 295, 2002

by

Aniket Basu (1,4), R S Saraswat (1,5), Kedar B Khare (1,2), G P Sastry (1) and Sougato Bose (1,3)

1 Department of Physics and Meteorology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, 721302, India
2 The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, USA
3 Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
4 On leave from: Department of Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA.
5 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed.

==================================================

A pleasing memento of Tikka Dukan, alias, Harry's!

====================================================
.