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At school in Muthukur we were not very much aware of caste and religious distinctions between us classmates. Of course there were many Muslim students and we knew them since their names were revealing...starting with either Sheik (Sk) or Sayyed (Sd). But they were all great sports and I made many Muslim friends although they dropped out of school before our school finals.
Things were slightly different when I went to our university at Vizagh. Except for Sastrys and Sharmas, who were obviously the hated brahmins, the last names didn't reveal their castes. Moorthy could be any caste and so could Rao. And we never asked.
After I oversaw the draftsman's work (ensuring he didn't steal the tracing papers or India ink), I was asked to help in getting 3 prints of each of the figures.
This was done by a process known as diazo-printing (later known as blueprinting). This called for special ammonia-papers the packet of which had to be opened in the dark. There was a wooden frame on which the tracing paper with its diagram was screwed up and an ammonia paper inserted in the slot behind it. The frame was then taken out and placed on a wooden chair facing sunshine. After 3 minutes the ammonia gets enough ultraviolet from the sunshine and leaves a bluish paper with a blackish diagram on it...
...only trouble was that it was monsoon time and the sun hid behind the clouds every other minute...
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At school in Muthukur we were not very much aware of caste and religious distinctions between us classmates. Of course there were many Muslim students and we knew them since their names were revealing...starting with either Sheik (Sk) or Sayyed (Sd). But they were all great sports and I made many Muslim friends although they dropped out of school before our school finals.
Things were slightly different when I went to our university at Vizagh. Except for Sastrys and Sharmas, who were obviously the hated brahmins, the last names didn't reveal their castes. Moorthy could be any caste and so could Rao. And we never asked.
By when we came to our final year we grew close enough to subtly reveal our castes. This was by our curious love affairs. There were not enough girls in our university for all of us to fall in love with, on a one-on-one basis. But there were our Telugu film heroines each of who could easily take a handful of student-lovers without fist fights...mind you, lovers are not the same as fans...love is lot deeper.
This rich and brilliant Moorthy in our class one day revealed to me that he had fallen head over heels in love with this young and popular film heroine, J, and was bent on grabbing and marrying her as early as he could. I asked him why J and why not B or R or S. He winked and replied that J belonged to the same caste as he...a vysya (bania). He was heart-broken when he came to know that J was of mixed brahmin-vysya parentage and her parents wanted to marry her to a brahmin rather than a vysya...which they did eventually. My wife tells me that the eventual hubby of J was a distant relative of hers and she pointed her out to me in a marriage function of their sub-caste that we attended. Unfortunately J was in her seventies by then and I could hardly recognize her as Moorthy's erstwhile sweetheart. Felt glad for Moorthy who married a pucca Vysya girl who made him happy enough.
As soon as we passed our M Sc and joined our research labs, things became wide open. We came to know that the two wings on the ground floor of our JVD College housing our research labs came in two flavors...brahmin (south wing) and non-brahmin (north wing). Brahmin students without exception gravitated to the south wing and found their research guides there, and the others drifted to the north wing. And when a south-winger walked in the north wing, eyes focused on him and moved till he was out of sight, like radar antennas. Our interaction soon stopped.
On the very first day of my research life I was grabbed by a brahmin scholar 3 years senior to me who was on the verge of writing and submitting his thesis. And I was asked to assist in getting his thesis done up.
I came to know that there was only one typewriter shared between the two wings and it traveled from one wing to the other by hook and crook and steal and keep. There was a brahmin typist for the south wing and a non-brahmin for the north wing. Our brahmin typist was a Jagannadha Rao. Not everyone could type a Ph D thesis...the thesis went to the US or England and the examiners would throw it out even if there was a single typing error...corrected by eraser or not. So, the approved typist had to be a perfectionist.
Jagan was a full time employee in the Registry and so was available only during nights....that was why my senior needed a sleepless assistant like me...Three copies of the thesis had to be submitted and that meant reams of carbon papers for the 350-page thesis...Jagan used to change carbon papers after every 3 pages saying that foreign examiners have very stringent standards of legibility. Part of my job was to see that he didn't steal too many carbon papers...they were frightfully expensive.
After a couple of months, the thesis typing was through after passing my scrutiny. And the job of copying the diagrams came up. Since the thesis was experimental, there were too many graphs and circuit diagrams, and a brahmin draftsman had to be found to draw them on a tracing paper with India ink (that had nothing to do with India...The process of making India ink was known in China as far back as the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, during Neolithic China.[1] India ink was first invented in China...)
This was done by a process known as diazo-printing (later known as blueprinting). This called for special ammonia-papers the packet of which had to be opened in the dark. There was a wooden frame on which the tracing paper with its diagram was screwed up and an ammonia paper inserted in the slot behind it. The frame was then taken out and placed on a wooden chair facing sunshine. After 3 minutes the ammonia gets enough ultraviolet from the sunshine and leaves a bluish paper with a blackish diagram on it...
...only trouble was that it was monsoon time and the sun hid behind the clouds every other minute...
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