Gole Bazaar 1960s - Hollow Hangar

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As you step down the High Street you get into the Low Street that will eventually take you to the T-Junction.

The first thing you notice on your right is this huuuge building with a red brick wall and red roof along the lines of the warehouses of Strand Road of Calcutta. Or the (in)famous FCI godowns. Or our very own Hangar (often spelt hilariously 'Hanger') near the Old Building at IIT KGP.

When I talk of our Hangar I recall Mark Antony's quote:

"O! What a fall was there, my countrymen!"

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, coming out intact outwardly but as hollow as the heads created by Brahma's meddlesome Assistant:

Indra's batch squeezed not one but two @Home Parties from my wife where everyone was asked to narrate their best joke.

Indra's own went like this:

"Brahma, the Creator, had to go to the toilet for a few minutes and asked his Assistant to keep watch over all those skulls that were ready for release, but not touch any. But his Assistant thought he got his fifteen minutes of fame and released some. And when Brahma returned and took a head-count he found that a million or so went missing from his worktable. On being quizzed closely his Assistant confessed. Brahma was dubious and asked:

'Did you pack the contents from my Godrej almirah before releasing them?'

The Assistant said he didn't know the key of that almirah. And then Brahma shook all his four heads unanimously and said tearfully, a la Jesus:

'Oh! You know not what you've done!'

The Assistant was sorry but consoled his Boss:

'Don't worry, I marked them all THUS',

...hands circling his head twice."

Coming back to our huge Hangar near the boundary wall of the Hijli Station, my good friend N once took me there as soon as I joined IIT to show off his M. E. 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 (http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2011/09/pratiks-invite.html) from my friend, Prof H Das (sadly no more) 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...


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