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"There will come a time when the dead would crowd out the living"
..............Bernard Shaw
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I don't know now but during my time at IIT KGP there was this "Obsolescence Committee". Actually it was probably: "Obsolescence Removal Committee" but the 'Removal' was always removed, leaving the short name of the Committee as piquant as the "Crime Branch of the Police".
I had always been associated willy-nilly with the Fourth Year Phy Lab there. In 1988 or so, there was this insatiable demand for more and more space on the fourth floor (where this lab grew up) from the Administration (meaning Accounts, Establishment, Purchase, Cash etc Sections). It was a case of the tail wagging the dog, a la Parkinson's Law...or as SDM put it, "It wanted to expand like a gas into vacuum"...and where there was no vacuum, they wanted to create one by a suction pump.
Anyway, the new Director asked us to 'shift ho' to the ground floor into what was till then a no-man's land. During its sojourn on the fourth floor over a couple of decades, the Fourth Year Lab was in a constant state of rejuvenation and so there were a large number of obsolete and discarded trinkets like single-beam oscilloscopes which flickered, signal generators that didn't generate signals, burnt out sodium vapor lamps occupying half the lab space.
And I thought the opportunity had now come to junk them and move only such equipment that were in working condition.
But, Tarapado-da, the STA in-charge of the lab, said he didn't dare discard them since they had to be 'written off' by the Obsolescence Committee whose whereabouts no one knew. So, we had to shift every blessed piece of junk to the new lab which was half the size of the old lab, and the junk had to be carefully preserved in an attic half the size of the new lab. By and by after a decade, when more and more junk accumulated, the attic got filled up and the nouveau-junk had to be accommodated under the tables of Teachers as well as the Taught...
And then Tarapado-da retired and I too retired, having never seen the faces of this mysterious Obsolescence Committee.
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After seven glorious years of stay in our Faculty Hostel, I shifted to Qrs C1-97 in 1974 because my sister, V, younger to me by a good decade, joined the one-year DIIT (Phys) and would rather not stay in the Girls SN Hall. And C1-97 was not an easy walking distance from the Main Building of the Institute.
Then my friend NP gave me his imported 24" Humber cycle for our use. Apparently he inherited it from his elder brother and brought it all the way from his native place, Kurnool, when he joined IIT KGP in 1963. He loaded it in the Brake Van of the Howrah Mail by which he was traveling, and drove it to the Gokahle Hall where he was allotted a room, with his suitcase following him on a rickshaw.
I enjoyed riding the Humber till 1984 when I bought my Chetak scooter. By then, NP's son, D, grew too tall for the regulation 22" bikes and the Humber went to him till 1994 when he left for the US. By then, my own son grew too tall for the 22" cycles and the Humber came back to him.
And in 2000, I bought my car, and my Chetak was usurped by my son.
By then the good old Humber was about a half-century old and signs of age were showing up, not because of metal fatigue but because of non-availability of spare parts. Gopi, the cycle-boy, gave up his efforts to get new tires and tubes and sprockets and rims, and the Humber was becoming like a holy cow that went skeletal and dry:
=======================================================================
"There will come a time when the dead would crowd out the living"
..............Bernard Shaw
*********************************************************************************************************
I don't know now but during my time at IIT KGP there was this "Obsolescence Committee". Actually it was probably: "Obsolescence Removal Committee" but the 'Removal' was always removed, leaving the short name of the Committee as piquant as the "Crime Branch of the Police".
I had always been associated willy-nilly with the Fourth Year Phy Lab there. In 1988 or so, there was this insatiable demand for more and more space on the fourth floor (where this lab grew up) from the Administration (meaning Accounts, Establishment, Purchase, Cash etc Sections). It was a case of the tail wagging the dog, a la Parkinson's Law...or as SDM put it, "It wanted to expand like a gas into vacuum"...and where there was no vacuum, they wanted to create one by a suction pump.
Anyway, the new Director asked us to 'shift ho' to the ground floor into what was till then a no-man's land. During its sojourn on the fourth floor over a couple of decades, the Fourth Year Lab was in a constant state of rejuvenation and so there were a large number of obsolete and discarded trinkets like single-beam oscilloscopes which flickered, signal generators that didn't generate signals, burnt out sodium vapor lamps occupying half the lab space.
And I thought the opportunity had now come to junk them and move only such equipment that were in working condition.
But, Tarapado-da, the STA in-charge of the lab, said he didn't dare discard them since they had to be 'written off' by the Obsolescence Committee whose whereabouts no one knew. So, we had to shift every blessed piece of junk to the new lab which was half the size of the old lab, and the junk had to be carefully preserved in an attic half the size of the new lab. By and by after a decade, when more and more junk accumulated, the attic got filled up and the nouveau-junk had to be accommodated under the tables of Teachers as well as the Taught...
And then Tarapado-da retired and I too retired, having never seen the faces of this mysterious Obsolescence Committee.
********************************************************************************************************
After seven glorious years of stay in our Faculty Hostel, I shifted to Qrs C1-97 in 1974 because my sister, V, younger to me by a good decade, joined the one-year DIIT (Phys) and would rather not stay in the Girls SN Hall. And C1-97 was not an easy walking distance from the Main Building of the Institute.
Then my friend NP gave me his imported 24" Humber cycle for our use. Apparently he inherited it from his elder brother and brought it all the way from his native place, Kurnool, when he joined IIT KGP in 1963. He loaded it in the Brake Van of the Howrah Mail by which he was traveling, and drove it to the Gokahle Hall where he was allotted a room, with his suitcase following him on a rickshaw.
I enjoyed riding the Humber till 1984 when I bought my Chetak scooter. By then, NP's son, D, grew too tall for the regulation 22" bikes and the Humber went to him till 1994 when he left for the US. By then, my own son grew too tall for the 22" cycles and the Humber came back to him.
And in 2000, I bought my car, and my Chetak was usurped by my son.
By then the good old Humber was about a half-century old and signs of age were showing up, not because of metal fatigue but because of non-availability of spare parts. Gopi, the cycle-boy, gave up his efforts to get new tires and tubes and sprockets and rims, and the Humber was becoming like a holy cow that went skeletal and dry:
My good friend NP too tried to rejuvenate it but gave it up. And my retirement was fast approaching and I tried to gift it away to anyone who was willing...but everyone was very eager provided I bring it back to her original glory. I tried to discreetly interest our Nehru Museum but my good colleague, Prof STA, quit its Chairmanship by then and the newcomer wasn't interested ;-)
My friend, NP, retired and was leaving KGP six months before I did, and when offered his Humber, he smiled charmingly...
I thought that, on the eve of my quitting KGP for good, folks would rush to our Qrs in a scramble to pick up loose odds and ends, which they did. A couple of refrigerators, a washing machine, a color TV, a sofa set, and several pieces of furniture and books by the scores went up like smoke, either given away or sold for a song. My Chetak and my Hero Jet also had takers. And our Dhobi snatched away a couple of cots as mementos...but he already had a Chetak by then and wasn't interested in a Vintage Humber. No one, yes, no one, even looked at it...poor thing!
And I was getting agitated since I had to surrender my Qrs B-140 in order to get clearances, and I hoped the Clerk who 'accepted' our Qrs with several signatures here and there before issuing me a No-Demands Certificate, would take the Humber away. He looked at the majestic cycle standing proudly in my scooter-room but asked me to 'vacate' the scooter-room which he had to lock up by an Institute Lock...rules being rules. I begged him to please let it stay there. And, looking at my sad face, the Clerk permitted the Humber to stay inside safe from heat, rain and hail...
I don't know what happened to the Humber when the new occupant to Qrs B-140 opened his scooter-room...I knew the gentleman well but was too scared to ask him when I visited KGP 5 years later...he might offer to ship it to Hyderabad.
I then recalled a touching scene when I took my sister, V, to the Alipore Zoo in 1974. She enjoyed her picnic and was fascinated by several animals and birds she saw for the first time...like the stunning pair of milk-white swans gliding on the lake.
But she refused to visit the Camel-Enclosure saying that she didn't like to look at camels. I asked her why, since camel, unlike tiger and lion, was a docile animal. She then said she never liked to look at a camel ever since she read a Chandamama story in her childhood in whose last scene, with a lovely color figure, was the pathetic look on the face of a camel that was abandoned in the desert by its owners who were fleeing a violent sand-storm...
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