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From boyhood on I learned that I have butterfingers...except, as it turned out, in the Electronics Lab.
The realization started when I was about 7 and my medico uncle was visiting us at our village. I saw him playing with a new gadget which he called a keyring, and a key. You know the thing...
He was inserting the key in and taking it out, again and again. Till then we never had keyrings...we used a piece of lehanga-nada, looped and tied in a knot. Father, a devout brahmin never without his sacred thread, used it as an improvised keyring. Mother had her mangalyam and safety pins.
I asked my uncle to show it to me. And I found it had an ad for Parke-Davis etched on one side and the slogan: "Prevention is better than cure" on the other. And my uncle boasted that it was made of 'toughened stainless steel'...a thing I never heard of.
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...(In Dhaka)...All plastic cold drink bottles - Coca Cola, 7 Up and something called Mountain Dew - together with all plastic bottled water with screw-tops have an additional sleeve of cylindrical plastic covering their tops. To get at the contents one has to first remove this plastic sleeve as one can't unscrew the top with it on. This is, no doubt, a precaution against adulteration of the content with contraband or a device with some hygienic purpose.
The problem is that these plastic sleeves are resistant to most human persuasion, notwithstanding the use of finger nails, knives, points of scissors etc. It even takes professional salesmen at cold drink stalls half a minute of grappling with them to get at the water or cola. With the temperature near 37 degrees C, persistent dehydration and the absence of canned beer, I have spent hours in the day grappling with these plastic prophylactics on water and other bottles and watched others do the same. It's as frustrating as trying to open the little packets of sugar and powdered milk that they give you on meal trays in economy class in airlines. One feels embarrassed to admit failure and press the light button to summon the air-hostess and ask her to tear open the wretched packet for you...
.... Farrukh Dhondy, Edit Page, DC, Saturday, 30 March 2013
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From boyhood on I learned that I have butterfingers...except, as it turned out, in the Electronics Lab.
The realization started when I was about 7 and my medico uncle was visiting us at our village. I saw him playing with a new gadget which he called a keyring, and a key. You know the thing...
He was inserting the key in and taking it out, again and again. Till then we never had keyrings...we used a piece of lehanga-nada, looped and tied in a knot. Father, a devout brahmin never without his sacred thread, used it as an improvised keyring. Mother had her mangalyam and safety pins.
I asked my uncle to show it to me. And I found it had an ad for Parke-Davis etched on one side and the slogan: "Prevention is better than cure" on the other. And my uncle boasted that it was made of 'toughened stainless steel'...a thing I never heard of.
And he asked me to insert his key into it. I tried for ten minutes, hurt my fingers and bled my thumb but couldn't do it. I gave it up.
I then graduated to using a fountain pen and Swan ink. The new bottle had a cap screwed on to its mouth firmly. But it had a seal-sleeve attached to it that went round the periphery of the cap. Father showed how to open it...just twist the cap and the seal breaks. But not for me. When I tried gingerly, it wouldn't yield at all. And when I applied brute force, the cap and the seal would turn together round and round. And when I used a screwdriver to lift the seal, it lifted parts of the cap as well so that the ghastly thing would never fit the bottle again.
And then the finger nails. They grew at an alarming rate and Father would ask me to clip them since they are unhygienic. And would give me his used half-blade. And it was mayhem for me. By and by I became an expert at clipping my finger nails by biting them. But the toe nails grew like sin and as I was not a contortionist I had to ask Father to kindly do the surgery.
Nowadays I am as toothless as a babe and I try to use one of a dozen nail-files gifted to me by friends...there was a time when gifting an imported nail-file was the in-thing. I discovered that the design of a nail-file is hi-tech. None of the dozen except one would do the job for me cleanly and bloodlessly...I have been using it for the last two decades, rust and all...it was gifted to me by Prof RSS...he bought it in Paris.
When I was young, like Father Williams, I had sharp teeth which could cut open the sealed packets of Company Chips. But no longer...I have to ask Ishani to please help ...she has sharp milk teeth.
Unlike J and Harris and George, I never bought a pineapple tin...I dislike the tang of the slices. But while a bachelor at KGP in the 1960s I bought a can of condensed milk. Like them, I too failed to open the sealed top of the damn thing and had to throw it out of the third floor window.
Coming to the quote above, I wonder how that chap, who had to seek the help of the air-hostess to tear open his sugar packet, managed to open his packet of prophylactic balloons...
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We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the
picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another,
and Harris got a spoon ready.
Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out
everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the
boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank
and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.
Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the
knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the
scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing
their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of
the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat
and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over,
uninjured, and broke a teacup.
Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went
up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat
and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the
sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and
poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought
it down.
It was George’s straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that
hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the pipes
are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have
passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the
stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.
Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.
After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast
till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.
[Picture: Flattened tin] We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we
battered it into every form known to geometry—but we could not make a
hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so
strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got
frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on
the grass and looked at it.
There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a
mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the
thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river,
and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and
rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.
...Three Men in a Boat
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