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RKN was lucky...he was living in Madras, one of the four metro-cities in India. And could watch Eddie Polo and Elmo Lincoln.
I had my schooling in Muthukur which didn't have any movie theater...there came once in a while what we called a 'Touring Talkies' but it showed only grainy Telugu movies of a sort.
So America was a sealed book for me at school...we were flooded with everything that was British who had just then wound up their 200-year-old empire and withdrew from the world like Jerry running into his hole and peeping.
All our English textbooks had lessons that made no mention of America. Except one. That was a cute non-detailed book called: 'Abe Lincoln the Frontier Boy'. I just loved it even though our third form teacher, Ms Ranemma, didn't know which 'l' in it was silent...she heard that one of them indeed was! So, she took turns.
That book was unique. It had a figure or two on each page. But these were all dark blotches showing no features at all...I don't know why. Father called them 'shadow-figures' (silhouettes). It was there I heard of Kentucky for the first time...the last was in the Hyderabadi KFC outlets. I also wondered why Lincoln's sister and mother were both named Sarah (just now I Googled and found that Sarah was his fond stepmother).
Strangely this ignorance of things American continued even at our university where we had to read all of 17 books for our Part I English exam (called 'subsidiary' English). None of these had any piece written by any American author, not even Frost:
At school we came to know more about England than even the English school boys of our age did...like we knew where Shakespeare was born and what the name of his wife was. Had to mug them up.
The little we knew of America came from our geography textbooks in our school-final. The only cities of America we heard of were Chicago, Detroit, and Washington...we didn't even know that the city of Washington had a D. C. tail tucked after it...the expansion of that was a quiz question that came much later.
Chicago was forbidding. Our geography teacher, Raghava Rao (a brahmin like me), used to describe (with a hanky covering his nostrils) how in the huge factories of Chicago thousands of sheep were fed from one end and tins of mutton emerged at the other (a strictly irreversible process). The only competitors for Chicago, we had to mug up, came from Australia and New Zealand.
Detroit, on the other hand, was much more civilized for us...all cars and buses we ever saw were manufactured there in millions. The only old car in Muthukur that belonged to Gopala Reddy, the richest landlord, had a 'Ford' inscribed somewhere on it. On the other hand, the Muthukur-Nellore bus had 'Chevrolet' on its bonnet or below it.
None of us, including I guess Raghava Rao sir and my HM Father, knew how to pronounce that Chevrolet. All of us rhymed it with the 'chalklet' that was always there in our pocket. I just saw a video how to pronounce the damn thing:
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The silent movies of the Twenties were the main source of our knowledge of America when I was growing up in Madras. We had a theater called Roxy in our neighborhood. For an outlay of two annas (about two cents) one could sit on a long teakwood bench, with a lot of others, facing the screen. When the hall darkened, there came before us our idols and heroes --- hard-hitting valorous men such as Eddie Polo and Elmo Lincoln, whose arms whirled around and smashed up the evil-minded gang, no matter how many came on at a time, retrieved the treasure plan and saved the heroine while on the verge of losing her life or chastity. The entire saga as a serial would be covered in twenty-four instalments at a rate of six a week, with new episodes presented every Saturday. When Eddie Polo went out of vogue, we were shown wild men of the Wild West, cowboys in broad-rimmed hats and cartridge-studded belts, walking arsenals who lived on horseback forever chasing, lassoing and shooting. We watched this daredevilry enthralled, but now and then questioned, when and where do Americans sit down to eat or sleep? Do they never have walls and doors and roofs under which to live? In essence the question amounted to, "After Columbus, what?"
...RKN
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RKN was lucky...he was living in Madras, one of the four metro-cities in India. And could watch Eddie Polo and Elmo Lincoln.
I had my schooling in Muthukur which didn't have any movie theater...there came once in a while what we called a 'Touring Talkies' but it showed only grainy Telugu movies of a sort.
So America was a sealed book for me at school...we were flooded with everything that was British who had just then wound up their 200-year-old empire and withdrew from the world like Jerry running into his hole and peeping.
All our English textbooks had lessons that made no mention of America. Except one. That was a cute non-detailed book called: 'Abe Lincoln the Frontier Boy'. I just loved it even though our third form teacher, Ms Ranemma, didn't know which 'l' in it was silent...she heard that one of them indeed was! So, she took turns.
That book was unique. It had a figure or two on each page. But these were all dark blotches showing no features at all...I don't know why. Father called them 'shadow-figures' (silhouettes). It was there I heard of Kentucky for the first time...the last was in the Hyderabadi KFC outlets. I also wondered why Lincoln's sister and mother were both named Sarah (just now I Googled and found that Sarah was his fond stepmother).
Strangely this ignorance of things American continued even at our university where we had to read all of 17 books for our Part I English exam (called 'subsidiary' English). None of these had any piece written by any American author, not even Frost:
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an
American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was
published in America.
The little we knew of America came from our geography textbooks in our school-final. The only cities of America we heard of were Chicago, Detroit, and Washington...we didn't even know that the city of Washington had a D. C. tail tucked after it...the expansion of that was a quiz question that came much later.
Chicago was forbidding. Our geography teacher, Raghava Rao (a brahmin like me), used to describe (with a hanky covering his nostrils) how in the huge factories of Chicago thousands of sheep were fed from one end and tins of mutton emerged at the other (a strictly irreversible process). The only competitors for Chicago, we had to mug up, came from Australia and New Zealand.
Detroit, on the other hand, was much more civilized for us...all cars and buses we ever saw were manufactured there in millions. The only old car in Muthukur that belonged to Gopala Reddy, the richest landlord, had a 'Ford' inscribed somewhere on it. On the other hand, the Muthukur-Nellore bus had 'Chevrolet' on its bonnet or below it.
None of us, including I guess Raghava Rao sir and my HM Father, knew how to pronounce that Chevrolet. All of us rhymed it with the 'chalklet' that was always there in our pocket. I just saw a video how to pronounce the damn thing:
America struck us with all her might when we became research scholars at Vizagh. There was this 'just-foreign-returned' Dr C R K Murthy in tight jeans smoking Marlboro. And he was reputed to have been at East Lansing for his sabbatical year. And that was in Michigan, like our Detroit. And he brought with him 'microfilms' of many American Ph D theses in NQR like Dean's thesis which was our Bible...we copied its circuit diagrams. And the microfilm manufacturing company was at Ann Arbor, in Michigan again. Apparently Michigan produced things other than Chevrolets.
The other American trademark was the Reader's Digest that was flooding our university just then with its annual gift subscription packages. I continued reading RD for a few years after I went to IIT KGP. The names DeWitt Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace haunted me like some strange melodies.
I have to admit shamelessly that I never heard of MIT till I went to IIT KGP when I was all of 21...and I was supposed to be a know-all...I had mugged up names of all the 48 states of USA (along with their capitals) and this bit of useless knowledge won me friends who were otherwise snobs of a sort.
And the first quiz question I had to face from my seniors at IIT KGP was:
"Which American city has a branch of IIT?"
I didn't know and was laughed at:
"Chicago" (again!)
The names of most of the American universities like Caltech and Stanford at one end and Lehigh at the other and their supposed rankings, I heard from Reco-seeking final years bandying them.
It is all so different now.
My son was traveling a dozen times to the US, coast to coast, on business trips, and to Europe half as many times. But never set foot on England except for a transport from Heathrow to Gatwick on his way to New York. And he used to bring a few American coins and Euors as mementos.
And three of these small coins somehow entered the left pocket of my pants. And Ishani plays with them often. And she knows their names: quarter, dime, and nickel. No shillings but.
How strange that the America which went decimal in its currency as long ago as 1784 should still be sticking to gallons and miles!
Talking of Indian currency, we used to have one-rupee notes and two-rupees notes, and five-rupee notes even a couple of decades back. These are now as extinct as dinosaurs. The reason, we were told, was that their lifetime was too short and they got soiled and torn too soon and it became expensive for our RBI to keep printing them. Apparently the coins that replaced them were more long-lasting since they were made of cheap enough alloys not to be melted away by our black-marketeers.
But, as the value of our rupee plunges like Niagara, the coins are becoming smaller and smaller and vanishing from the market. There was a time we couldn't get hold of a one-rupee coin for love or money. So I used to get a 'chalklet' from the shops instead of a rupee coin. And I didn't know what to do with it. Ishani's mom is against my giving them to her daughter since they spoil her milk-teeth. And I have no teeth at all...milk or wisdom.
I also saw in some flea markets in Hyderabad cardboard pieces with signatures on them being exchanged as valid one-rupee coins.
India could have issued, like Tughlak, coins of leather....but leather is so expensive nowadays...the leather belts used by software professionals (before they had to tighten them on global recession) cost anything like a thousand rupees.
For the moment, however, the Indian Government solved the problem by finding a cheap alloy and making the new rupee coins small enough to slip through my fingers (Ishani won a 10-rupee worth 'chalklet' once by exhibiting one of them in a game-show).
I guess very soon I will need a microscope to see our newer and newest one-rupee coins.
I think our government should buy an American biotechnologist, jail him in splendid isolation with a constant supply of food, drink and concubines, and make him invent a top secret genetically inverted version of a high-yielding weed giving copious Guriginja seeds which are black all over except for a spot of red at their bottoms...much like our politicos...
Each of these new seeds can replace the shrinking one-rupee coin...and carried in bushels.
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