Cyclic Memories - 1

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"Some days later his cycle-shop friend got him into trouble with my father. One afternoon my brother had come home, gone directly into his room, and locked himself in. Shortly came the cycle-shop keeper, who had been all smiles the other day, now looking grim, propelling along with difficulty a cycle with damaged handle bars and awry wheels. He gesticulated and shouted wildly, and the commotion he created brought the entire family out, including my father, who came downstairs. My brother had taken a cycle on hire, had fallen off, damaged the machine, quietly put it back in its stand over the gutter, and come away without even paying the hire-charges. My father mollified the shopkeeper and sent him away, then knocked fiercely on my brother's door and got him out. His nose was blood-covered and full of scratches, his elbows were bleeding, and his clothes had blood marks and mud stains. My father glared angrily at him and demanded an explanation. He gave him a slap but before he could do further damage to him, the women screamed and rushed to his protection. My grandmother was particularly vociferous, and my father retreated to his sanctum upstairs, unwilling to have a confrontation with his mother-in-law."

.....................RKN in 'My Days'

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So, even RKN's HM-Father was scared of his mother-in-law...to say nothing of my own feeble HM Father, who, as I said in a earlier post, used to refer to his mom-in-law as Hitler (behind her back):

 http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/08/banshees.html

There are two books I often take out from my small book-shelf to steal from for my blogs. One is RKN's 'My Days'. This thin 185 page book of his memoirs was first published in 1973 when he was 67. I had bought it in 1975 from A H Wheelers on their bookstall on Platform # 2 at KGP station for Rs 6.50 only. And covered it with a calender page. Its pages have now become as brittle as the Mexican Tortilla papads my son fed me the other day:

http://www.fotosearch.com/CSP587/k5876709/

Also, its pages are dotted with wormholes of all shapes and sizes that drill through many pages at a go. So, I have to handle it with great care. I could ask my son to order a new copy for me from Flipkart...but I don't... because my ancient copy has a nostalgia value for me.

After I read it a couple of times, I gave it to DB for browsing. He liked it so much that he gave it to his mississ and his dot-product both of who are MAs (English) from Jadavpur. They didn't want to return it. So, one day DB offered me a deal...could I exchange it with any book I like in his Physics Collection? I said ok and opted for his Advanced Quantum Mechanics of J J Sakurai which didn't have an Indian Edition then and the American one was too expensive for my pocket.

So I swapped My Days with his AQM. 

One night around 9 PM Prof AM visited my Qrs and I could see he was completely shaken. A little probing revealed that AM's son flunked his IIT JEE and AM was shell-shocked.

I then quoted to him from memory how RKN's HM-Father reacted when RKN failed in English and had to sit at home for a year:

"I had been certain of failure in these two subjects (physics and chemistry) but, as if by a miracle, I had somehow passed in them though not with flying colours. On the contrary, I had failed where I was most confident --- English. I failed so miserably and completely that everyone wondered if I was literate at all. My father, in spite of his strict attitudes in school matters, had one pleasant quality --- he never bothered about the examination results. He always displayed sympathy for a fallen candidate; he had no faith in the examination-system at all. But even he was forced to exclaim in surprise, 'Stupid fellow, you have failed in English! Why?..."

Prof AM asked me where he could get the book where this quote can be found. I told him that it is in My Days and my copy of it was available with DB. He then straight drove to DB's Qrs and borrowed it for a day (DB was very particular he return it by next evening suspecting that AM would nationalize it).

Next morning AM came to my Qrs and thanked me for the book. And went to DB's place and returned it. 

A day before my retirement I went to DB's room with his copy of AQM saying that he can keep it too since I am done with Physics...and DB returned my My Days in the afternoon. You may wonder why either DB or AM wouldn't buy a cheap copy of My Days which has perhaps been in continuous print. 

I don't know the answer to this...it may be like the Telugu proverb:

"Shankham lo posthe ne teertham"

meaning:

"Water becomes holy only if it is dispensed out of the Puja conch-shell"

Or, maybe it is like the Stradivarius Violin whose price increases exponentially with time as its timber (and timbre) ages.

My copy of 'My Days' went to Nellore with my luggage while I was forced to flee flying to Hyderabad on my retirement. I guess it was at Nellore where it stayed unopened for three years in a cardboard box that moths read it to their hearts' content.   

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Ford & God (for adults only)

 "...Having published many novels, essays and short stories, Narayan is credited with bringing Indian writing to the rest of the world. While he has been regarded as one of India's greatest writers of the twentieth century, critics have also described his writings with adjectives such as charming, harmless and benign.^[98] Narayan has also come in for criticism from later writers, particularly of Indian origin, who have classed his writings as having a pedestrian style with a shallow vocabulary and a narrow vision.^[13] According to Shashi Tharoor, Narayan's subjects are similar to those of Jane Austen as they both deal with a very small section of society. However, he adds that while Austen's prose was able to take those subjects beyond ordinariness, Narayan's was not.^[99] A similar opinion is held by Shashi Deshpande who characterizes Narayan's writings as pedestrian and naive because of the simplicity of his language and diction, combined with the lack of any complexity in the emotions and behaviours of his characters^{[100] "}

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._K._Narayan

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Upon reading this paragraph I recalled a slightly off-color joke that was doing the rounds in our Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP:

Henry Ford went to Heaven for all the good that he did to humanity and confronted God, who asked him:

"What is your biggest achievement?"

"Making a low-cost automobile that changed the American road scene forever....What is yours?"

"Making Eve"

"No good...the design is all wrong"

"What is wrong with it?"

"The driver's seat is not comfortable"

"But many more people ride my model than yours!"

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