Gole Bazaar 1960s - Which Tech?

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Then there was this gorgeous shop called Pujara's. It rivaled Bhandari's in its forbidding looks...glass and aluminum structures and a guy who looked down on all customers unless they reeked of dough. Pujara's used to sell high-end electronic gadgets and cameras and seemed very proud of their ware...Philips and Kodak pedigree.

Half a century down, no one would recognize their bulky dinosaurs with red-hot vacuum tubes emitting more heat than sound...they consumed anything like 100 Watts of electricity and produced a few Watts of sound.

I was very happy with my understanding of Electronics in my AU, Vizagh, during 1962-63. We had a fantastic teacher and a fantastic lab...a rare combination. I can't say that of Optics. We had a wonderful lab but a poor teacher. Most of our Physics teachers didn't understand the subjects they were teaching. The only reason they were tolerated was that they put on a grim attitude so that we never had the courage to ask them any question. That question-answer culture was just missing. We were always afraid that we would be jeered and snubbed. All in all the whole of our college life was a terrible ordeal.

In particular, Optics is a treacherous subject. There is no way you could hide behind differential equations like in QM. There was hardly any math in our UG Optics...just have a look at our standard text book: Jenkins & White. If I had my way, I would have beaten Jenkins and his White into pulp. Because, they made the subject so tantalizing. It was clear that the topics they discussed were beautiful...innumerable glossy pictures of fringe patterns and spots; but their treatment was terribly misleading. I had to struggle to learn the subject all by myself over 4 decades and still not happy.

The costliest Philips Radio Set was called Power House or something like that. The only thing I remember of it is that it had fly-wheel tuning. That was Mechanics and I think it was the only good Mechanics topic that is wedded to Electronics to this day.

The first Radio set I saw was in our Village, Muthukur, in 1955. One of our neighbors bought a battery-operated set because there was no Electricity in our Village. The battery set was bulkier than the radio and had to be frequently taken to Nellore for replacement.

And then in 1957, I saw the first imported Transistor Set in my cousin's house at Nellore. It was the size of say the bound volume of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. We wondered how such a sleek portable gadget could work without the cumbersome Battery Set we had known. We never learned transistors at our University. The joke was that one of our Research Scholars appeared in an interview at BARC and he was asked if he ever saw a transistor. He said: "Yes!" triumphantly and he was asked bow big it was and he showed with his hands stretched about nine inches apart in length and three inches in width...

And then there was this Bombay Photo Studio. The Punwani that owned and manned it was equally stiff-collared, because he was constantly in demand for bringing his mountable camera to various Halls of IIT for their Group Photos. The gadget was like the huge tripod carried by CE students during their Survey classes. And he would mount his camera on it with nuts and bolts so it won't shake. And cover his head and the camera's head with a dark cloth and make all sorts of fine adjustments for focus, distance, aperture and stuff while the students were all commanded to stand still behind their seated Wardens.

And suddenly he would wave his right hand in a vast semicircle and remove the cap covering the camera's 'eye' and close it after a good while. Naturally, someone or the other of his 'subjects' would sneeze or a crow would peck at his camera at the crucial moment; and the whole drill had to be repeated...several times for backups.

Once my boyish-looking friend V and I went to the Bombay Photo Studio to invite P for taking a Group Photo of our Physics Staff when a good old Prof was retiring.

V: We want a Group Photo taken at IIT

P: Which Tech?

V: Ahem, we want a Group Photo taken at IIT

P: Arrey Baba, I am asking you, Which Tech?

V: I can't follow your question

P: Is it for B Tech or M Tech?

I still recall vividly our P-V dialogue as if it was yesterday...

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