Hollow Hangar

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Hollow Hangar

1965: IIT KGP:

Unto our huge Hangar near the boundary wall of the Hijli Station my good friend Prof NP once took me as soon as I joined IIT to show off his Mech Engg Workshop Practice Lab housed in it. 

I was simply ASTOUNDED. I never saw anything like that at our University. There were a dozen huge lathes, another dozen milling machines and a few more weird Yakshas (you can see one of those Yakshas outside the Nehru Museum...it was christened so by Mrs KLC).

Dozens of students were milling around each of those lathes and milling machines, some watching, some waiting, while others went into production. It was a terrific manufacturing ruckus as pleasing to Mechanical Engineers as theodolites to Civil Engineers.

A couple of decades later, I got an Invite from my friend, Prof H Das of AgE to attend their Krishi Mela. I asked him the Venue and he said it was in the Old Hangar. I was surprised and went there to find to my utter astonishment that not one of those Yakshas was present there any longer.

I was too diplomatic to ask how exactly they became extinct, but guessed like the proverbial screw driver kit at home, the bigger ones ate up the smaller; and the Biggest of all committed suicide thereafter.

A few more years later I got an Invite for the Golden Jubilee Lunch at the same Hangar...I didn't go, as a mark of protest.

Well, our Hangar building didn't really crash and fall...it was too sturdy for that. But its innards got scooped out like that proverbial wood apple as it passes through the alimentary canal of that proverbial elephant and ejected...

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