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The other day I was talking about the Gestetner cyclostyle machine that was the official property of Shri P. G. Bose of the Students Section at IIT KGP in 1965. Most of the young readers of this blog wouldn't have seen a Gestetner, so let me describe it briefly since it had held sway for more than 30 years till Xerox (of a sort) arrived at KGP. It had the following components (sorry this is becoming a lab note book):
1. The machine itself. It was truly a wonder. It was robust and compact and could easily sit on a teacher's table. You feed a packet of thick white (rather) papers at one end. And they exit at the other end one by one with whatever you wanted to copy on them. A good machine could roll up to anything like a thousand pages at a go, if handled by experts, with intermittent re-inking and cooling off.
2. Stencils. These came in packets of 100 or so. Each stencil is nothing but a heavily waxed thin but sturdy paper. The wax is glued so firmly on the paper that it doesn't peel off unless you want it to, by a special device called the 'stencil cutter'. After cutting, the stencil is inserted and held firmly on the drum of the cyclostyle machine. It is a sort of master copy 'negative'. The holes you cut on it appear as prints on the white papers you feed into the machine.
3. Graver with a Rowel. This is the Webster jargon for a stylus (hence the 'style' in cyclostyle). The stylus is like a pencil with its lead tip replaced by a sharp point that endures like the diamond tip of a glass cutter. You write on the stencil with this stylus. As you write firmly, the wax on the stencil paper is removed or cut away making appropriate holes on the stencil. After cutting, say, the figure of a rose on your stencil (PGB would shout at you though), you insert the cut stencil on the drum of the machine.
4. Ink. This came in a semisolid form like a toothpaste in a huge toothpaste tube. You apply the ink little by little on the jaw of the drum. Of course the ink will dirty your hands and it is a sure giveaway that you had been fiddling with the machine...your wife will kill you if you don't soap your hands well before eating and touching her.
5. Erasing Fluid. Of course you are going to make mistakes while cutting the stencil with your stylus. And you want to hide them from PGB. So you apply, with a tiny brush, a bit of the white fluid that came in a mini-ink-pot. This white paint is waxy and so it restores the wax on the hole you made foolishly. You wait and wait till the erasing fluid dries up before rewriting on the stencil with the whitener on its hole. It is messy. If you are in a hurry to go to the canteen for your fag, you have to breath hard on the fluid that you applied on the stencil, like you exhale your smoke.
6. Diluter. The erasing fluid comes with this companion bottle. The fluid itself is white and waxy and the inventor couldn't make it stay in the fluid form once the bottle is opened and exposed to air...it dries up in the bottle itself and would refuse to come out. Then you shake the diluter bottle and pour one or two or ten drops into the erasing fluid bottle. This somewhat coaxes the fluid to please come out. The diluter is colorless so you don't confuse it with the erasing fluid.
7. Paper Packets. You slit the cover open and handle the papers with your dirty hands and get rebuked by PGB.
That is all.
Mr VKS joined the Physics Department at IIT KGP in 1965 as an Associate Lecturer, along with me. We two were like the twin birds on that tree of the Mundaka Upanishad. Unlike me, he was smart, handsome, well-dressed, popular with men, women, and girls, and even with PGB.
One day he came to our joint office in a great mood. Apparently PGB happened to see his handwriting somewhere (VKS was an Assistant Warden) and was impressed, and summoned him to his august office. VKS was worried if he had been discovered having done anything wrong like siphoning some funds of the R K Hall. But, no! PGB asked him to sit down and gave him a sheet of a handwritten circular in the scrawl of PGB who was not famous for his neat handwriting like Mahatma Gandhi.
And gave VKS the holy stylus of Ganapati and asked him to 'cut' a stencil. And VKS did what he was told. And PGB practically kissed VKS and appointed him his honorary stencil cutter (with singaras and rossogullas and Wills Filters as sweeteners). Then on, VKS used to be summoned by PGB every other day for an hour or two for cutting important stencils (seen by the Director).
And VKS was as pleased as Ishani is when her ma'am sticks a shiny little 'star' on the back of her palm (Ishani's).
But it didn't last long.
VKS left IIT KGP to California as a graduate student within 2 years.
I wonder if his resume' had this in it:
6. Official Stencil Cutter of IIT KGP
Just bitching...
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The other day I was talking about the Gestetner cyclostyle machine that was the official property of Shri P. G. Bose of the Students Section at IIT KGP in 1965. Most of the young readers of this blog wouldn't have seen a Gestetner, so let me describe it briefly since it had held sway for more than 30 years till Xerox (of a sort) arrived at KGP. It had the following components (sorry this is becoming a lab note book):
1. The machine itself. It was truly a wonder. It was robust and compact and could easily sit on a teacher's table. You feed a packet of thick white (rather) papers at one end. And they exit at the other end one by one with whatever you wanted to copy on them. A good machine could roll up to anything like a thousand pages at a go, if handled by experts, with intermittent re-inking and cooling off.
2. Stencils. These came in packets of 100 or so. Each stencil is nothing but a heavily waxed thin but sturdy paper. The wax is glued so firmly on the paper that it doesn't peel off unless you want it to, by a special device called the 'stencil cutter'. After cutting, the stencil is inserted and held firmly on the drum of the cyclostyle machine. It is a sort of master copy 'negative'. The holes you cut on it appear as prints on the white papers you feed into the machine.
3. Graver with a Rowel. This is the Webster jargon for a stylus (hence the 'style' in cyclostyle). The stylus is like a pencil with its lead tip replaced by a sharp point that endures like the diamond tip of a glass cutter. You write on the stencil with this stylus. As you write firmly, the wax on the stencil paper is removed or cut away making appropriate holes on the stencil. After cutting, say, the figure of a rose on your stencil (PGB would shout at you though), you insert the cut stencil on the drum of the machine.
4. Ink. This came in a semisolid form like a toothpaste in a huge toothpaste tube. You apply the ink little by little on the jaw of the drum. Of course the ink will dirty your hands and it is a sure giveaway that you had been fiddling with the machine...your wife will kill you if you don't soap your hands well before eating and touching her.
5. Erasing Fluid. Of course you are going to make mistakes while cutting the stencil with your stylus. And you want to hide them from PGB. So you apply, with a tiny brush, a bit of the white fluid that came in a mini-ink-pot. This white paint is waxy and so it restores the wax on the hole you made foolishly. You wait and wait till the erasing fluid dries up before rewriting on the stencil with the whitener on its hole. It is messy. If you are in a hurry to go to the canteen for your fag, you have to breath hard on the fluid that you applied on the stencil, like you exhale your smoke.
6. Diluter. The erasing fluid comes with this companion bottle. The fluid itself is white and waxy and the inventor couldn't make it stay in the fluid form once the bottle is opened and exposed to air...it dries up in the bottle itself and would refuse to come out. Then you shake the diluter bottle and pour one or two or ten drops into the erasing fluid bottle. This somewhat coaxes the fluid to please come out. The diluter is colorless so you don't confuse it with the erasing fluid.
7. Paper Packets. You slit the cover open and handle the papers with your dirty hands and get rebuked by PGB.
That is all.
Mr VKS joined the Physics Department at IIT KGP in 1965 as an Associate Lecturer, along with me. We two were like the twin birds on that tree of the Mundaka Upanishad. Unlike me, he was smart, handsome, well-dressed, popular with men, women, and girls, and even with PGB.
One day he came to our joint office in a great mood. Apparently PGB happened to see his handwriting somewhere (VKS was an Assistant Warden) and was impressed, and summoned him to his august office. VKS was worried if he had been discovered having done anything wrong like siphoning some funds of the R K Hall. But, no! PGB asked him to sit down and gave him a sheet of a handwritten circular in the scrawl of PGB who was not famous for his neat handwriting like Mahatma Gandhi.
And gave VKS the holy stylus of Ganapati and asked him to 'cut' a stencil. And VKS did what he was told. And PGB practically kissed VKS and appointed him his honorary stencil cutter (with singaras and rossogullas and Wills Filters as sweeteners). Then on, VKS used to be summoned by PGB every other day for an hour or two for cutting important stencils (seen by the Director).
And VKS was as pleased as Ishani is when her ma'am sticks a shiny little 'star' on the back of her palm (Ishani's).
But it didn't last long.
VKS left IIT KGP to California as a graduate student within 2 years.
I wonder if his resume' had this in it:
6. Official Stencil Cutter of IIT KGP
Just bitching...
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