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Before withering away, like Karl Marx's ideal communist state, the carbon copy gave its last hiccough.
In the mid-1970s, after I became at last Dr. G. P. Sastry Ph D for what he was worth, one or two students started visiting me for getting Recos to American universities. Naturally I was pumped up that at last I had arrived, till they said that senior professors declined to give more than one precious Reco per student nor to more than two students in a year. That was a bit of a pull-me-down, since one doesn't want to be the dregs of the departmental barrel. Still, I thought something was better than nothing and I consented.
And they pushed bunches of 3 or 4 glued-up sheets of different color schemes...red, yellow, green...one for my master, one for the dame, and one for the little clerk who lives down the lane.
There were no carbon papers sandwiched between them and I thought I had to hand-copy each of the damn pages. But no...they said it was the marvel of the latest American Tech and that all that I had to do was to write hard on the top page; and the other 2 or 3 get copied automatically as if by P. C. Sorcar's magic.
It was a disaster. I realized that the top page was meant to be typed so that the pin-point hammer blows do the rest of the job neatly. But neither I nor any other professor, except our HoD, had access to a typewriter. All we had were Swan fountain pens with deflowering nibs and Apasara pencils whose tips broke or blunted the moment you exerted the tiniest pressure...pencil sharpeners were yet to arrive and we had to use shaving blades, thus shaving our fingertips. Good quality ball pens were in the future tense.
In order to test without spoiling the colorful Reco pages, I first wrote gingerly with my pencil and found that the top copy was all that looked legible...the rest needed lots of imagination. So I had to ink up the top page and touch up the carbon-less copies by my fountain pen...the result was most ugly. Fortunately I learned later on that no one ever read my poetic Recos...they just checked if they were there. The rule was, I was told, like:
"Oh, last year we took 3 Chinese, 2 Vietnamese and 1 Indian. So this year let us take 3 Indians, 2 Vietnamese and 1 Chinese"
The other day I was talking about our Gestetner cyclostyle machine:
"a machine for making multiple copies that utilizes a stencil cut by a graver whose tip is a small rowel"...Webster.
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Before withering away, like Karl Marx's ideal communist state, the carbon copy gave its last hiccough.
In the mid-1970s, after I became at last Dr. G. P. Sastry Ph D for what he was worth, one or two students started visiting me for getting Recos to American universities. Naturally I was pumped up that at last I had arrived, till they said that senior professors declined to give more than one precious Reco per student nor to more than two students in a year. That was a bit of a pull-me-down, since one doesn't want to be the dregs of the departmental barrel. Still, I thought something was better than nothing and I consented.
And they pushed bunches of 3 or 4 glued-up sheets of different color schemes...red, yellow, green...one for my master, one for the dame, and one for the little clerk who lives down the lane.
There were no carbon papers sandwiched between them and I thought I had to hand-copy each of the damn pages. But no...they said it was the marvel of the latest American Tech and that all that I had to do was to write hard on the top page; and the other 2 or 3 get copied automatically as if by P. C. Sorcar's magic.
It was a disaster. I realized that the top page was meant to be typed so that the pin-point hammer blows do the rest of the job neatly. But neither I nor any other professor, except our HoD, had access to a typewriter. All we had were Swan fountain pens with deflowering nibs and Apasara pencils whose tips broke or blunted the moment you exerted the tiniest pressure...pencil sharpeners were yet to arrive and we had to use shaving blades, thus shaving our fingertips. Good quality ball pens were in the future tense.
In order to test without spoiling the colorful Reco pages, I first wrote gingerly with my pencil and found that the top copy was all that looked legible...the rest needed lots of imagination. So I had to ink up the top page and touch up the carbon-less copies by my fountain pen...the result was most ugly. Fortunately I learned later on that no one ever read my poetic Recos...they just checked if they were there. The rule was, I was told, like:
"Oh, last year we took 3 Chinese, 2 Vietnamese and 1 Indian. So this year let us take 3 Indians, 2 Vietnamese and 1 Chinese"
The other day I was talking about our Gestetner cyclostyle machine:
"a machine for making multiple copies that utilizes a stencil cut by a graver whose tip is a small rowel"...Webster.
N. B.: I don't want to consult Webster for 'graver' or even 'rowel'...let sleeping rowels lie...
(N. B. stands for: nota bene... a late discovery for me today...it means 'note well'...not Notice Board)
I heard this word, cyclostyle, as soon as I joined IIT KGP in 1965. There was only one precious cyclostyle machine in the whole of IIT then and that was housed on a table by the seat of Shri P. G. Bose, Assistant Registrar of Student Affairs.
Like so many in Bengal then, PGB was a sworn bachelor and so he devoted all his time administering to the needs of our students. Legend had it that he knew every student at IIT by his Roll Number and Name, and the Halls to which they were attached. I guess it was one of those facile reputations.
Even I had such a reputation, in a small way, with my 60 odd 2nd year Chemical Engg students. I happened to memorize just one name, Deepak Jana, and the face that went with it, in my first lecture. And he was absent in my tenth lecture. I used to take attendance at the end of the class hour those days. And when I called out Deepak's name, Ranajit Biswas of the same Hall stood up and barked:
"Yes, sir!"
And I smiled broadly at Ranajit and the rest of the class, and stared at him, and he turned pink. Then on, I got this terrific reputation of elephantine memory for the rest of my stay at KGP.
Of course I never allotted any marks for attendance, and eventually didn't even bother to take roll call...that was yet another reputation I got...I was once rebuked by the Dean for it, but he couldn't stop my salary or pension...
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