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The Poet says:
"Into each life some rain must fall"
and the first rain to fall fearfully in my long life took place in 1953 when I was 10 and in Class 8.
Our first experience of the thrill of driving and speed was with a cycle tyre. You run alongside it when it starts rolling and keep tapping it at the right intervals to make up for its speed-loss due to rolling friction. It is a delicate craft. The same principle of periodic pulses in the right phase drives the Class-C Oscillators like the Hartley and Colpitt which were the bane of students in the Fourth Year Lab...they thought they knew everything about them but in general never heard of the non-linearity of the dynamic characteristic which allows the oscillations to grow and stabilize.
But it is just child's play...even girls can do it because the cycle tyre is pretty wide. The really masculine stuff comes later when the cycle tyre is replaced by a thin steel wheel welded to make it look like a giant millipede coiled on itself in a single turn.
Here I recall a cartoon strip of Punch circa 1955: This kid was watching a millipede going about its business in the garden and then pokes her with a stick, upon which she coils upon herself. And then he kicks her with his foot and the millipede takes off rolling speedily along the ground. And the kid shouts: "Wheel!"; contradicting the claims of mech engineers as the original inventors of the wheel.
To drive this steel wheel you are given a steel rod with a hook at its end. You hold one end of the rod in your hand, insert the wheel in the hook at the other end and GO! It takes a lot of balancing skill to drive it, steer it and run it for miles without it or you slipping and falling. And then you claim your place in the Village Record Book.
I was practicing this for days on end and became perfect. And one Novemeber evening I took off with it on the highway to our neighboring village...now famous for its port and scams...Krishnapatnam.
And there was this unexpected shower that grew into a downpour and I was stranded with my wheel. And got as wet as a duckling with its duckback yet to grow waterproof. And took shelter under a wayside tree already housing a couple of farmers caught like me.
And then the tears swelled and grew into a veritable stream. I was crying aloud and my farmer friends tried to understand and cajole. But they didn't know...my Father forbade me to get wet since I had just recovered from a bout of cold and my mom expressly told me not to get my khakhi knicker drenched since that was the fourth in a week and the last in my pitiable wardrobe...khakhi knickers don't dry easily in the rainy season and I would have to go to school in a wet and darkened outfit shamefully.
The rain stopped after half an hour and I was at my wit's end how to face the just retribution at home. But kids have their fairies and on my way back, one of my 'girl-friends' happened to have a look at me and my tearful face and asked what happened. And she invited me into her home and explained the situation to her mom. They asked me to strip my khakhi knicker (there was nothing beneath it to show off...rather) and hand it over...which I did shamefacedly.
The good girl took it away and brought it back hot and dry within ten minutes...apparently they had going a roaring chulha made up of three stones and a couple of dried wood for cooking their khichri in a huge earthen pot which gave place to my wet underpant.
The white drill shirt dried itself by my terrific body-heat.
And I thanked them copiously and reached home as if nothing happened. Father was then frying a whole onion holding it with a tongs on our own chulha and gave me a peel that tasted like heaven.
I don't recall how I thanked my girl friend...perhaps I wrote her English Assignment for her:
"Write a letter to the Class Teacher asking for leave of absence for attending your sister's marriage"...
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*... http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/01/lears-best.html
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"Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary."
......H W Longfellow
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Having lived on the Coast of Coromandel of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo* in my childhood, and all along the coast of the Bay of Bengal for the first 62 years, rain, hail, cyclones, storm surges, kaal baishakhis and a tsunami that threatened to leave me stranded have been bywords for me...no dust-storms though.
I was trapped in the Howrah-Madras Mail for three days and four nights when the coast was hit by a devastating cyclone, with little food and less water (both drinking and cleansing). And I almost missed my own marriage ceremony due to another cyclone...ours was the last train to reach the wedding locale. I don't know what would have happened if I really missed that breathtaking event...I read that soldiers of yore, when they missed their date due to the call of an unexpected battle, used to let a ceremonial sword take their place for the nonce. And Physics teachers, I guess, should ask a set of Feynman Volumes to do the job...and hope Feynman wouldn't claim his bit of the plum pie...
My seaside village, Muthukur, at the southern tip of AP lies in a curious rain-shadow region. No, there were no mountains blocking the rain-laden South-West monsoon winds...the region from my Village to, say, Kanyakumari lies in an inward notch of the coast. Both the Bay of Bengal branch and the Arabian Sea branch give it a miss. So, we have almost 10 months of uninterrupted sunshine. But, the South-West Monsoon, while withdrawing from the Indian subcontinent retreats through this patch of land, giving copious steady rainfall during November and December...enough to irrigate the crops and fill up the tanks good for the whole of next year.
For village kids like me those ten months were uninhibited playtime on the streets.
"Into each life some rain must fall"
and the first rain to fall fearfully in my long life took place in 1953 when I was 10 and in Class 8.
Our first experience of the thrill of driving and speed was with a cycle tyre. You run alongside it when it starts rolling and keep tapping it at the right intervals to make up for its speed-loss due to rolling friction. It is a delicate craft. The same principle of periodic pulses in the right phase drives the Class-C Oscillators like the Hartley and Colpitt which were the bane of students in the Fourth Year Lab...they thought they knew everything about them but in general never heard of the non-linearity of the dynamic characteristic which allows the oscillations to grow and stabilize.
But it is just child's play...even girls can do it because the cycle tyre is pretty wide. The really masculine stuff comes later when the cycle tyre is replaced by a thin steel wheel welded to make it look like a giant millipede coiled on itself in a single turn.
Here I recall a cartoon strip of Punch circa 1955: This kid was watching a millipede going about its business in the garden and then pokes her with a stick, upon which she coils upon herself. And then he kicks her with his foot and the millipede takes off rolling speedily along the ground. And the kid shouts: "Wheel!"; contradicting the claims of mech engineers as the original inventors of the wheel.
To drive this steel wheel you are given a steel rod with a hook at its end. You hold one end of the rod in your hand, insert the wheel in the hook at the other end and GO! It takes a lot of balancing skill to drive it, steer it and run it for miles without it or you slipping and falling. And then you claim your place in the Village Record Book.
I was practicing this for days on end and became perfect. And one Novemeber evening I took off with it on the highway to our neighboring village...now famous for its port and scams...Krishnapatnam.
And there was this unexpected shower that grew into a downpour and I was stranded with my wheel. And got as wet as a duckling with its duckback yet to grow waterproof. And took shelter under a wayside tree already housing a couple of farmers caught like me.
And then the tears swelled and grew into a veritable stream. I was crying aloud and my farmer friends tried to understand and cajole. But they didn't know...my Father forbade me to get wet since I had just recovered from a bout of cold and my mom expressly told me not to get my khakhi knicker drenched since that was the fourth in a week and the last in my pitiable wardrobe...khakhi knickers don't dry easily in the rainy season and I would have to go to school in a wet and darkened outfit shamefully.
The rain stopped after half an hour and I was at my wit's end how to face the just retribution at home. But kids have their fairies and on my way back, one of my 'girl-friends' happened to have a look at me and my tearful face and asked what happened. And she invited me into her home and explained the situation to her mom. They asked me to strip my khakhi knicker (there was nothing beneath it to show off...rather) and hand it over...which I did shamefacedly.
The good girl took it away and brought it back hot and dry within ten minutes...apparently they had going a roaring chulha made up of three stones and a couple of dried wood for cooking their khichri in a huge earthen pot which gave place to my wet underpant.
The white drill shirt dried itself by my terrific body-heat.
And I thanked them copiously and reached home as if nothing happened. Father was then frying a whole onion holding it with a tongs on our own chulha and gave me a peel that tasted like heaven.
I don't recall how I thanked my girl friend...perhaps I wrote her English Assignment for her:
"Write a letter to the Class Teacher asking for leave of absence for attending your sister's marriage"...
*******************************************************************************************************
*... http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/01/lears-best.html
======================================================================
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