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On the third day of my visit to our Siva Typing Institute at Vizagh to retrieve some of that Rs 30 I paid in advance to its owner, and started typing asdfgf, I noticed that the letters on the paper came out all red instead of black. And I asked my senior about it and he came down and toggled a switch (much like the child lock of my son's Tata Indigo), and lo and behold, letters turned black once again.
Talking of child locks in our family sedan, they are supposed to trap little Ishani inside safe so that she doesn't open her back door and jump out on the wrong side. But it never works that way. When she is in the back seat, the child lock always finds itself unlocked...and it gets automatically locked whenever I am in there...a variant of Murphy's Law. Then Ishani jumps out of her front seat and opens my back door for me shouting:
"Don't worry!...I am here...just a minute...ok?"
A couple of weeks later, in my typing institute, I was allowed to insert an overused carbon paper into the typewriter. Of course it always got itself folded up and wrinkled and it was a curse to get it out.
I recall that carbon papers too came in a variety of color schemes in addition to black. There was blue, surely, and maybe a sort of sepia.
And there were some senior typewriter-artists amongst us...they used to produce Hanumanjee's figure using +++ and --- and *** symbols...and get rebuked by the Manager...and venerated by Bajrang Bhakts.
I thought, with the advent of computers and color printers, the good old carbon papers vanished from the Hyderabad scene. But no! On the first of every month I travel to our CBRE office to pay my monthly maintenance of Rs 1500 to the young chap there manning his computer and talking on his perennial cell phone. After he dumps my cash into his box and enters my name and flat number in his computer hard disk, he takes out his pocket-size receipt book and uses a slice of the good old carbon paper...auld lang syne...
Also, the carbon copies of my youth have come to stay in the ultramodern e-mail jargon. When I 'send' a mail to Aniket in Cal with copies to Sourya in Chile and Shamik in Paris and they get them in their inbox within seconds, I use what is called: 'cc'. Webster tells me that this approved abbreviation for 'carbon copy' is as old as 1983...just about when the PC was born.
cc is also a listed transitive verb...my son's ex-boss always used to scold his minions:
"cc me! cc me!! cc me!!!"
whenever they sent mails to their customers in America.
This 'customer' thing also bugs me often. There is a CRM, short for Customer Relationship Manager, I guess, in our gated community. This young chap once praised me:
"Sir, it is not easy to find customers like you who pay their dues on time on the first of every month"
I was somewhat irritated and rebuked him smilingly:
"I am no longer your customer...I am the OWNER of my flat...you are my customer!"
Anyway, in this process of cc'-ing from here to Cal to Chile to Paris, I guess there is no carbon atom involved at all...more like silicons...sc...
By and by I went to IIT KGP from Vizagh to teach students of chemical engineering most of the time. My section used to have about 50 students in the 1970s and 80s.
One day I got fed up with the misleading and wrong treatments of physical optics in most books available in the market and I wanted to write down my own class notes and distribute them to each of the 50 odd students in my class.
That was when I came into contact with the cyclostyle machine. The machine I was led to had this near-universal brand name:
Gestetner
And as usual, I was unsure how to pronounce the damn thing. My tough time with pronunciation of European words started from a tender age...while I was in my third form in school in 1954 in Muthukur. Nehrujee, with his Dove of Peace on his shoulder, was fond of the quite irrelevant UNO...the two big powers, America and Russia, didn't care a hoot for this UNO and indulged in raging hot Cold War. But Nehru loved sending our Indian Army to the UN Peace-Keeping Mission duties in Ethiopia or Congo or Timbuktu. And so we had a lot of lessons on UNO. And they were taught in Telugu.
We had to mug up the name of the then Secretary General of UNO since it was a favorite 'bit question'. His name, in all its glory, courtesy Google, is:
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On the third day of my visit to our Siva Typing Institute at Vizagh to retrieve some of that Rs 30 I paid in advance to its owner, and started typing asdfgf, I noticed that the letters on the paper came out all red instead of black. And I asked my senior about it and he came down and toggled a switch (much like the child lock of my son's Tata Indigo), and lo and behold, letters turned black once again.
Talking of child locks in our family sedan, they are supposed to trap little Ishani inside safe so that she doesn't open her back door and jump out on the wrong side. But it never works that way. When she is in the back seat, the child lock always finds itself unlocked...and it gets automatically locked whenever I am in there...a variant of Murphy's Law. Then Ishani jumps out of her front seat and opens my back door for me shouting:
"Don't worry!...I am here...just a minute...ok?"
A couple of weeks later, in my typing institute, I was allowed to insert an overused carbon paper into the typewriter. Of course it always got itself folded up and wrinkled and it was a curse to get it out.
I recall that carbon papers too came in a variety of color schemes in addition to black. There was blue, surely, and maybe a sort of sepia.
And there were some senior typewriter-artists amongst us...they used to produce Hanumanjee's figure using +++ and --- and *** symbols...and get rebuked by the Manager...and venerated by Bajrang Bhakts.
I thought, with the advent of computers and color printers, the good old carbon papers vanished from the Hyderabad scene. But no! On the first of every month I travel to our CBRE office to pay my monthly maintenance of Rs 1500 to the young chap there manning his computer and talking on his perennial cell phone. After he dumps my cash into his box and enters my name and flat number in his computer hard disk, he takes out his pocket-size receipt book and uses a slice of the good old carbon paper...auld lang syne...
Also, the carbon copies of my youth have come to stay in the ultramodern e-mail jargon. When I 'send' a mail to Aniket in Cal with copies to Sourya in Chile and Shamik in Paris and they get them in their inbox within seconds, I use what is called: 'cc'. Webster tells me that this approved abbreviation for 'carbon copy' is as old as 1983...just about when the PC was born.
cc is also a listed transitive verb...my son's ex-boss always used to scold his minions:
"cc me! cc me!! cc me!!!"
whenever they sent mails to their customers in America.
This 'customer' thing also bugs me often. There is a CRM, short for Customer Relationship Manager, I guess, in our gated community. This young chap once praised me:
"Sir, it is not easy to find customers like you who pay their dues on time on the first of every month"
I was somewhat irritated and rebuked him smilingly:
"I am no longer your customer...I am the OWNER of my flat...you are my customer!"
Anyway, in this process of cc'-ing from here to Cal to Chile to Paris, I guess there is no carbon atom involved at all...more like silicons...sc...
By and by I went to IIT KGP from Vizagh to teach students of chemical engineering most of the time. My section used to have about 50 students in the 1970s and 80s.
One day I got fed up with the misleading and wrong treatments of physical optics in most books available in the market and I wanted to write down my own class notes and distribute them to each of the 50 odd students in my class.
That was when I came into contact with the cyclostyle machine. The machine I was led to had this near-universal brand name:
Gestetner
And as usual, I was unsure how to pronounce the damn thing. My tough time with pronunciation of European words started from a tender age...while I was in my third form in school in 1954 in Muthukur. Nehrujee, with his Dove of Peace on his shoulder, was fond of the quite irrelevant UNO...the two big powers, America and Russia, didn't care a hoot for this UNO and indulged in raging hot Cold War. But Nehru loved sending our Indian Army to the UN Peace-Keeping Mission duties in Ethiopia or Congo or Timbuktu. And so we had a lot of lessons on UNO. And they were taught in Telugu.
We had to mug up the name of the then Secretary General of UNO since it was a favorite 'bit question'. His name, in all its glory, courtesy Google, is:
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld,
kindly shortened to:
Dag Hammarskjöld
Now, there is no 'a' sound (like in 'cat') in Telugu and so his first name was transcribed as:
Dog
and there used to be uproar in our Social Studies class till our teacher, Raghava Rao, beat up a couple of backbenchers.
Father pretended to know how to pronounce his last name, as:
Hammersheld
and it was accepted by all of us.
Since there was no internet and Google in the 1970s at IIT KGP, there was a group discussion on the dining table of our Faculty Hostel how to pronounce the awkward Gestetner. And the Eng Lit gent had his final say, like Thurber's Owl. And he declared for our benefit that it ought to be pronounced:
Jusner
To my eternal shame, that was how I pronounced it till half an hour ago when I Googled for it and got this video:
It asks me to pronounce it as it is writ:
Guest-et-ner
The chap is German-speaking and German is about the most phonetic of the European languages...
Guest-et-ner
The chap is German-speaking and German is about the most phonetic of the European languages...
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