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Google tells me that bifocals were invented by Benjamin Franklin...who else!
I saw these with my grandpa, the retired tehsildar of the British Regime. They were fitted in a heavy metal frame with circular rims like Gandhi chashma. And the two halves of the joint lens for each eye were semicircular.
One morning, when I was about 8, I was playing with them and an upper half of one combo lens came out in my hands. And I was worried and tried to push it back into its place...and the lower half also was in my other hand.
And I thought that was the end of me.
Soon grandpa came looking for his glasses and saw me and smiled. And with practiced skill fitted them both in their place in a jiffy and started reading his Hindu. I guess those days there were no glues for glasses and they were just pushed together and relied on the differential expansion of metal and glass. The technique of fusing the two glass pieces came into vogue by the time my Father acquired his bifocals. Mine were in a plastic frame with the D-shaped reading glass much smaller than the seeing glass, both somehow fused with a subtle seam. I guess now the fashion is progressive lenses, if not Lasik.
As my cataract worsened or matured (depending on how you look at it), I was again having difficulty with the staircase syndrome...I could somehow manage climbing up but not climbing down without holding a rail or my son's leading hands. And Hyderabad is full of roadside mounds of gravel and sand and construction materials and sludge.
And I was fond of accompanying my son and Ishani to her school in the mornings in my son's car. After getting down, my son had to hold my hand on one side and Ishani's hand on the other to negotiate the climb up and down the roadside silt in front of her school.
And then my son got busy taking his mock tests for his PMP exam each morning from 8 to 12. And asked me to drop Ishani in her school for a month. And it scared me stiff. But the first day I drove her in my old car, she got down like a lady and held my hand and led me nonchalantly up and down the mound to the merriment of everyone around. And she is 3 while I am on 70.
That was when I decided that I have to undergo that dreaded surgery that my wife, son, and D-i-L were urging me to go through for five odd years and I was postponing out of inertia and fear.
For, my experience with cataract surgery dates back half a century when my grannie went under the table. Apparently on her first visit to the eye surgeon, he advised her to wait for her cataract to mature...meaning that he wished to wait till her eye lens sort of solidified so he could tease it out with his tweezers in one piece.
During those decades the surgeon, after giving his patient an anesthetic injection in the eye, used to make a half inch incision, insert his tweezers, remove the lens from its moorings, pull it out, stitch up the hole he made; and asked the patient to stay in his ward for a handful of days with the eye covered by a cup. And then remove the sutures and asked her to go home wearing a black mask and return after a month for getting her new specs.
The patient meanwhile saw only bright light through her operated eye since there is no longer any lens to form images on the retina...till she got her external lens which was as thick as the soda-bottle of Muthukur. For, the eye lens has a lot of power, something like 20 odd Diopters...the lens-retina distance is so small. And everyone could recognize that grannie had undergone her cataract surgery...her thick glasses made her eyes look weird.
I don't think the younger generation has any idea what a Muhukur soda water bottle looked like...it was a marvel of hi-tech. The bottle came in blue-green color and was made of thickest possible glass to withstand that pressure of gas that went into it. And it had a neck that looked twisted and had a constriction into which a thick glass goli (the stopper) can go up but not go down below the bottleneck.
The bottling chap had a wooden box connected to a cylinder of CO2 gas (maybe). The box could hold three bottles at a go. And he fills the 3 bottles with dirty water and the goli would be down in the neck. The bottles went into their piped slots and he would then close the box and turn it on its axis 22 rounds...22 is the prescribed number since there were no precise gas gauges then, and on each turn gas leaks into the bottled water and dissolves to the required pressure without exploding.
And then with a flourish the chap would open his black box and remove the soda water bottles...and lo and behold...the ball has swum up and got stuck plumb in the mouth of the bottle sealing it. Great technology.
And he would hand me the three bottles to carry them home in my bag. And he would lend me the 'opener' which was a wooden cap with a pestle at its center that goes right into the mouth of the bottle and touches the stuck ball.
And it required a technique to manage the opener, which I could never master. Father would come in, hold the bottom of the bottle against his chest, push the opener into its groove and push it hard....and then that sweet and loud sound rattles everyone around...kheeeeeechhh!!!
During the 1950s our Nellore district was a hotbed of communism and there were frequent clashes between agitating boys and the local police like nowadays in our local universities. The police were always outnumbered but they had their lathis with them to 'charge' when they found the going tough. Nowadays the boys use stone-throwing as a safe measure of distant warfare...like their distance education.
But in Nellore those days the boys used high pressure soda water bottles as missiles...for unlike mere stones, they explode into flying glass pieces injuring the policemen grievously.
It was then that our Collector permitted the use of tear gas shells.
And the boys came up with their own antidote for tear gas...apparently all they had to do was carry a cut onion in their pocket, lie down on the ground, and crawl smelling the onion till they reach the smoking shell and hurl it back.
Our Muthukur soda chap also had another naturally flavored recipe that I don't see nowadays. He had in his bag what were called "Sabja Seeds". These looked like black cotton seeds, a little larger. On a hot day, we would sit down on his bench and request him for a glass of sabja soda. And he would open a soda water bottle...kheeeeeechhh!!!...and pour out the sizzling soda water into a glass tumbler in which he would dump a handful of sabja seeds. All at once the black seeds start turning mushy white sprouting hair follicles around them. I guess this was an endothermic process...for, in a second we would find that the glass of soda cooled down and we would drain it and feel our thirst truly quenched. The concoction also had a pleasant natural flavor.
Better than so many colas...
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Google tells me that bifocals were invented by Benjamin Franklin...who else!
I saw these with my grandpa, the retired tehsildar of the British Regime. They were fitted in a heavy metal frame with circular rims like Gandhi chashma. And the two halves of the joint lens for each eye were semicircular.
One morning, when I was about 8, I was playing with them and an upper half of one combo lens came out in my hands. And I was worried and tried to push it back into its place...and the lower half also was in my other hand.
And I thought that was the end of me.
Soon grandpa came looking for his glasses and saw me and smiled. And with practiced skill fitted them both in their place in a jiffy and started reading his Hindu. I guess those days there were no glues for glasses and they were just pushed together and relied on the differential expansion of metal and glass. The technique of fusing the two glass pieces came into vogue by the time my Father acquired his bifocals. Mine were in a plastic frame with the D-shaped reading glass much smaller than the seeing glass, both somehow fused with a subtle seam. I guess now the fashion is progressive lenses, if not Lasik.
As my cataract worsened or matured (depending on how you look at it), I was again having difficulty with the staircase syndrome...I could somehow manage climbing up but not climbing down without holding a rail or my son's leading hands. And Hyderabad is full of roadside mounds of gravel and sand and construction materials and sludge.
And I was fond of accompanying my son and Ishani to her school in the mornings in my son's car. After getting down, my son had to hold my hand on one side and Ishani's hand on the other to negotiate the climb up and down the roadside silt in front of her school.
And then my son got busy taking his mock tests for his PMP exam each morning from 8 to 12. And asked me to drop Ishani in her school for a month. And it scared me stiff. But the first day I drove her in my old car, she got down like a lady and held my hand and led me nonchalantly up and down the mound to the merriment of everyone around. And she is 3 while I am on 70.
That was when I decided that I have to undergo that dreaded surgery that my wife, son, and D-i-L were urging me to go through for five odd years and I was postponing out of inertia and fear.
For, my experience with cataract surgery dates back half a century when my grannie went under the table. Apparently on her first visit to the eye surgeon, he advised her to wait for her cataract to mature...meaning that he wished to wait till her eye lens sort of solidified so he could tease it out with his tweezers in one piece.
During those decades the surgeon, after giving his patient an anesthetic injection in the eye, used to make a half inch incision, insert his tweezers, remove the lens from its moorings, pull it out, stitch up the hole he made; and asked the patient to stay in his ward for a handful of days with the eye covered by a cup. And then remove the sutures and asked her to go home wearing a black mask and return after a month for getting her new specs.
The patient meanwhile saw only bright light through her operated eye since there is no longer any lens to form images on the retina...till she got her external lens which was as thick as the soda-bottle of Muthukur. For, the eye lens has a lot of power, something like 20 odd Diopters...the lens-retina distance is so small. And everyone could recognize that grannie had undergone her cataract surgery...her thick glasses made her eyes look weird.
I don't think the younger generation has any idea what a Muhukur soda water bottle looked like...it was a marvel of hi-tech. The bottle came in blue-green color and was made of thickest possible glass to withstand that pressure of gas that went into it. And it had a neck that looked twisted and had a constriction into which a thick glass goli (the stopper) can go up but not go down below the bottleneck.
The bottling chap had a wooden box connected to a cylinder of CO2 gas (maybe). The box could hold three bottles at a go. And he fills the 3 bottles with dirty water and the goli would be down in the neck. The bottles went into their piped slots and he would then close the box and turn it on its axis 22 rounds...22 is the prescribed number since there were no precise gas gauges then, and on each turn gas leaks into the bottled water and dissolves to the required pressure without exploding.
And then with a flourish the chap would open his black box and remove the soda water bottles...and lo and behold...the ball has swum up and got stuck plumb in the mouth of the bottle sealing it. Great technology.
And he would hand me the three bottles to carry them home in my bag. And he would lend me the 'opener' which was a wooden cap with a pestle at its center that goes right into the mouth of the bottle and touches the stuck ball.
And it required a technique to manage the opener, which I could never master. Father would come in, hold the bottom of the bottle against his chest, push the opener into its groove and push it hard....and then that sweet and loud sound rattles everyone around...kheeeeeechhh!!!
During the 1950s our Nellore district was a hotbed of communism and there were frequent clashes between agitating boys and the local police like nowadays in our local universities. The police were always outnumbered but they had their lathis with them to 'charge' when they found the going tough. Nowadays the boys use stone-throwing as a safe measure of distant warfare...like their distance education.
But in Nellore those days the boys used high pressure soda water bottles as missiles...for unlike mere stones, they explode into flying glass pieces injuring the policemen grievously.
It was then that our Collector permitted the use of tear gas shells.
And the boys came up with their own antidote for tear gas...apparently all they had to do was carry a cut onion in their pocket, lie down on the ground, and crawl smelling the onion till they reach the smoking shell and hurl it back.
Our Muthukur soda chap also had another naturally flavored recipe that I don't see nowadays. He had in his bag what were called "Sabja Seeds". These looked like black cotton seeds, a little larger. On a hot day, we would sit down on his bench and request him for a glass of sabja soda. And he would open a soda water bottle...kheeeeeechhh!!!...and pour out the sizzling soda water into a glass tumbler in which he would dump a handful of sabja seeds. All at once the black seeds start turning mushy white sprouting hair follicles around them. I guess this was an endothermic process...for, in a second we would find that the glass of soda cooled down and we would drain it and feel our thirst truly quenched. The concoction also had a pleasant natural flavor.
Better than so many colas...
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If I remember right, the "Sabja" seeds are nothing but one variety of Tulsi(Basil) seeds. They are quite aromatic and good for health too!
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