Reminiscence Circuitry

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I asked Aniket, when he was in Hyderabad a couple of years back, if he didn't indulge in KGP nostalgia. He had left KGP a decade back then after a 5-year stint there. I thought a decade is just about the right time for nostalgia to ripen. And then there was this shopworn truism that one can take a KGPian out of KGP but not the other way round.

He simply said: "No"

I was a little taken aback because he is not the "business first, pleasure arterwards" sort as Sam Weller said about King Richard the Third "wen he stabbed the other King in the tower, afore he smothered the babies"

Quite the other way round if I know him aright...we are birds of similar feather.

I then asked him how come?

His reply was unique: "I have such a vivid memory that I remember the past as if it was yesterday"

I could well imagine that one can't be too nostalgic of yesterday's events. Rather. Maybe that is why his blogspot has so few reminiscences.

Proper nostalgia requires a series of memory filters. Particularly if you are in this Reminiscence Business. RKN's My Days, among his other pieces, is an example. The other one I read is Thurber's outrageous tales of his Columbus, Ohio, years.

Now that I am also in this Reminiscence Mode with a vengeance after my retirement, I think I am sort of an expert on the subject. Very few must have written about 850 tall tales on a daily basis culling memories of as uninteresting places as Muthukur and Kharagpur.

If one is a blogger of Current Events like my idol Shobha De, one can rest assured of an audience in thousands. And get paid too. On the other hand, I count my blogging worthwhile if I can find a handful of readers of my junk on a regular basis. People (except possibly Research Scholars @ KGP) have no time at all for reading things other than what is useful or titillating. At best they can afford 5 minutes. That places a severe restriction on the number of words in a typical post.

To squeeze an experience of a day or more into 5 short minutes requires a Circuitry. Hartley-type old-fashioned oscillators always fascinated me. They have a DC supply and an AC output. And a positive feedback that doesn't escalate. And pick up their signals from circuit noise. And work in the nonlinear domain of the Dynamic Characteristic. And their tuned amplifier with its positive feedback runs in the Class C mode, meaning it supplies just 'pips' of power in the right phase to compensate for the ohmic losses. The result of all this complex arrangement is that you get a perfectly sinusoidal waveform steady over hours (if Tarpado-da helps you with the Pot in the Exam while your Teachers gossip about their HoD's tantrums).

For a Reminiscence Circuit, it is not enough if you pick up your topic signal from your Memory Noise and amplify it. You have to distort it by another Modulator Circuit. And suppress the unwanted sidebands. And then Demodulate it earthing the original signal but getting the Processed Waveform. And then apply Power Amplification with an apt Push-Pull Circuit. And then trim it and feed it to the Speaker which converts the audio output in the brain into video words of Hinglish.

Very complicated.

The end result is that the Reminiscence Writer or Blogger completely loses the initial signal picked up from his Memory Noise and starts believing in his printed or blogged word so faithlessly that he stands accused of dissembling if not outright lying. Just to come up with a readable short piece. Blunt Truth is unreadable, period.

About a year ago, I blogged a piece titled Bitter Surprises:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/10/bitter-surprises.html

Teernajee, then in Class VII or VIII, read it and remarked pithily:

"It is a blogful of gul"

And she said a mouthful!

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Postscript:

Aniket, and possibly Pratik, cracked the encryption of yesterday's blog in a jiffy. The Author of the quoted Letter (YXY) is indeed Prof MLM, a highly respected ex-HoD of IIT, KGP who was the Father of the Phy Dept's Computer Lab.

His pleasant encounters with Prof MLM must have finally done the impossible for Aniket...he must have felt fondly nostalgic about his HoD...I don't know about Pratik who was a latecomer to KGP Phy Dept's Fascinating Decades.


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