Cots & Boys - Repeat Telecast

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charpai

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shahidsaifi/4258866589/

The glowing white tube lights in our Loyland Bus at Muthukur came with their own problems of privacy.

In our villages in the 1950s when there was no 'current' and folks were forced to sleep in the open in their front-yards, privacy was at a premium. 

It followed the rule:

"The less privacy you have, the more you value it and guard it ferociously"

Like any other good thing of life like money, love and water.

I was told by my UP friend from Bulandshahr that in his childhood he was living in a joint family of about 30 men, women and kids. Apparently their ample home was divided into two halves called Janaana and Mardaana...the former for women and the latter for men...kids had a run of both up to a certain age. And they played in the quadrangle that separated the two. 

One can only imagine the strict rules that governed the access cards at night...

All of us at Muthukur slept in the open on our charpais (4-legged excuses for cots). The only criterion for them was their lightness so they can be lugged in and out at will whenever rain threatened us...we didn't mind a few drops in the hot and sultry weather.

The charpais were just 4 rods and 4 legs of juicy wood fresh from the wood...they were sold afresh without any seasoning or curing whatever. So the rectangular frame was subjected to either the pincushion or the barrel distortion we read in optics much later.

Once the frame was bought from the roadside shop after much haggling, it was brought home to be turned into a sleeper. For this we had to buy rolls of juicy fiber made of jute which too tended to ease and elongate, so the resultant shape of the cot was a fight between the frame and the fiber over time. And so the jute was never woven over the entire frame but a foot or a half was left on one side for pulling and tightening by jute ropes...the whole design was a clever ploy over the forces of Raw Nature.

Father was do-it-yourself-and-save-money guy and trained us in the subtle art of weaving the jute fiber over the wooden frame. He would squat on one side and do the needful and pass the roll over to me once under the cot and the next time over it to follow his handiwork and copy it. 

Now, as I said, except in the electronics lab, I was no good at arts and crafts. Indeed in our school we had a special last period once a week for this horrid workshop. As a primer we were given a hand-held spinning spindle called 'tanikhi' with a hook at its end into which we had to insert one end of a rough cotton ball with one hand and spin the damn thing with the other...the idea was that by and by the cotton ball would turn itself into cotton yarn...my foot!

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As soon as one succeeded in this primer, he was promoted first to a regular Gandhi Charkha, and then to a weaving loom of niwar tape...

Needless to say I never graduated to any of these higher rungs...for all those years at school I struggled with my tanikhi, producing warts and blobs of cotton and getting clumps on the head.

So, when Father asked me to pull I tended to push thinking and thinking...and get a banging...there was no way Father could walk back and forth and take charge of both sides and so it was like that story of Uncle Podger and his hammer.

Father only knew the roughest and ugliest pattern of warp and woof. But there were expert weavers going about on the streets of the village calling:

"Diamond Pattern...Diamond Pattern"

announcing that they would weave an arty cot pattern cuter than the nested squares shown in the above pic...but they charged money for their craft and so kids like me who wanted to see the diamond pattern emerge out of nowhere missed out.

My friend N told me about his venture when he was a boy...he was and is an expert in arts and crafts unlike me.

Apparently he pestered his father to call that chap on the road since he wanted to see how a diamond pattern is woven. And his father, in one of his weak moments, called the expert in and haggled. The chap demanded a whole Rupee (16 annas) and father started from 8 annas. The deal got stuck when the chap agreed for 12 annas and father was prepared to give no more than 10 annas. So it was a stalemate like India-Pakistan talks over J & K at Agra. 

And the chap left in a huff and father asked him to go to hell.

And then my friend followed the chappie till the bend in the road and gave him a fabulous 2 annas dug out from his heard-earned pocket money asking him to come over promising to say nothing to anyone here or hereafter...

Kids can be pretty ingenuous when they set their hearts on something they love...

http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/b/baby_cot.asp

 ...Posted by Ishani

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Whither Humber? - Repeat Telecast

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 "There will come a time when the dead would crowd out the living"
...Bernard Shaw




I don't know now but during my time at IIT KGP there was this "Obsolescence Committee". Actually it was probably: "Obsolescence Removal Committee" but the 'Removal' was always removed, leaving the short name of the Committee as piquant as the "Crime Branch of the Police".

I had always been associated willy-nilly with the Fourth Year Phy Lab there. In 1988 or so, there was this insatiable demand for more and more space on the fourth floor (where this lab grew up) from the Administration (meaning Accounts, Establishment, Purchase, Cash etc Sections). It was a case of the tail wagging the dog, a la Parkinson's Law...or as SDM put it, "It wanted to expand like a gas into vacuum"...and where there was no vacuum, they wanted to create one by a suction pump.

Anyway, the new Director asked us to 'shift ho' to the ground floor into what was till then a no-man's land. During its sojourn on the fourth floor over a couple of decades, the Fourth Year Lab was in a constant state of rejuvenation and so there were a large number of obsolete and discarded trinkets like single-beam oscilloscopes which flickered, signal generators that didn't generate signals, burnt out sodium vapor lamps occupying half the lab space. 

And I thought the opportunity had now come to junk them and move only such equipment that were in working condition.

But, Tarapado-da, the STA in-charge of the lab, said he didn't dare discard them since they had to be 'written off' by the Obsolescence Committee whose whereabouts no one knew. So, we had to shift every blessed piece of junk to the new lab which was half the size of the old lab, and the junk had to be carefully preserved in an attic half the size of the new lab. By and by after a decade, when more and more junk accumulated, the attic got filled up and the nouveau-junk had to be accommodated under the tables of Teachers as well as the Taught...

And then Tarapado-da retired and I too retired, having never seen the faces of this mysterious Obsolescence Committee.



After seven glorious years of stay in our Faculty Hostel, I shifted to Qrs C1-97 in 1974 because my sister, V, younger to me by a good decade, joined the one-year DIIT (Phys) and would rather not stay in the Girls SN Hall. And C1-97 was not an easy walking distance from the Main Building of the Institute.

Then my friend NP gave me his imported 24" Humber cycle for our use. Apparently he inherited it from his elder brother and brought it all the way from his native place, Kurnool, when he joined IIT KGP in 1963. He loaded it in the Brake Van of the Howrah Mail by which he was traveling, and drove it to the Gokahle Hall where he was allotted a room, with his suitcase following him on a rickshaw. 

I enjoyed riding the Humber till 1984 when I bought my Chetak scooter. By then, NP's son, D, grew too tall for the regulation 22" bikes and the Humber went to him till 1994 when he left for the US. By then, my own son grew too tall for the 22" cycles and the Humber came back to him. 

And in 2000, I bought my car, and my Chetak was usurped by my son.

By then the good old Humber was about a half-century old and signs of age were showing up, not because of metal fatigue but because of non-availability of spare parts. Gopi, the cycle-boy, gave up his efforts to get new tires and tubes and sprockets and rims, and the Humber was becoming like a holy cow that went skeletal and dry.

My good friend NP too tried to rejuvenate it but gave it up. And my retirement was fast approaching and I tried to gift it away to anyone who was willing...but everyone was very eager provided I bring it back to her original glory. I tried to discreetly interest our Nehru Museum but my good colleague, Prof STA, quit its Chairmanship by then and the newcomer wasn't interested ;-)

My friend, NP, retired and was leaving KGP six months before I did, and when offered his Humber, he smiled charmingly...

I thought that, on the eve of my quitting KGP for good, folks would rush to our Qrs in a scramble to pick up loose odds and ends, which they did. A couple of refrigerators, a washing machine, a color TV, a sofa set, and several pieces of furniture and books by the scores went up like smoke, either given away or sold for a song. My Chetak and my Hero Jet also had takers. And our Dhobi snatched away a couple of cots as mementos...but he already had a Chetak by then and wasn't interested in a Vintage Humber. No one, yes, no one, even looked at it...poor thing!

And I was getting agitated since I had to surrender my Qrs B-140 in order to get clearances, and I hoped the Clerk who 'accepted' our Qrs with several signatures here and there before issuing me a No-Demands Certificate, would take the Humber away. He looked at the majestic cycle standing proudly in my scooter-room but  asked me to 'vacate' the scooter-room which he had to lock up by an Institute Lock...rules being rules. I begged him to please let it stay there. And, looking at my sad face, the Clerk permitted the Humber to stay inside safe from heat, rain and hail...

I don't know what happened to the Humber when the new occupant to Qrs B-140 opened his scooter-room...I knew the gentleman well but was too scared to ask him when I visited KGP 5 years later...he might offer to ship it to Hyderabad.

I then recalled a touching scene when I took my sister, V, to the Alipore Zoo in 1974. She enjoyed her picnic and was fascinated by several animals and birds she saw for the first time...like the stunning pair of milk-white swans gliding on the lake.

But she refused to visit the Camel-Enclosure saying that she didn't like to look at camels. I asked her why, since camel, unlike tiger and lion, was a docile animal. She then said she never liked to look at a camel ever since she read a Chandamama story in her childhood in whose last scene, with a lovely color figure, was the pathetic look on the face of a camel that was abandoned in the desert by its owners who were fleeing a violent sand-storm...

...Posted by Ishani

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Elevators & Escalators

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BRITONS USING MORE U.S. WORDS

...Britons are using more American words because of the digital revolution and a growing influence of the U.S., said researchers who found that the word 'marvellous' owes its declining popularity to the American cliche 'awesome'...PTI

...DC Page 9 Wednesday 27 August 2014


 

It was in the early 1960s that we were first exposed to Americanisms of English language. Most of our teachers and elders frowned on them as barbarisms and vulgarisms. 

There are still half a dozen students and young Bengali friends of mine, young enough to be my sons, who rebuke me for writing color and flavor, without their 'u's in place. But they happily write Kolkata which I don't...I stick to my Oh, Calcutta...it can never be Oh, Kolkata for me.

The rise of Americanisms in India coincided curiously with the rise of feminism typified by public burning of bras...a thing Gandhiji would have loved...he burnt piles upon piles of British clothes in public and was sent to jail (gaol)...that 'gaol' reminds me of a senior professor of mechanical engineering at IIT KGP who wished to be known for his prowess in English and always wrote 'gaol' instead of 'jail' but pronounced it: 'goal'...a self-goal.

And this rise of 'American English' happened when the Bernard Shaw quote:

"England and America are two nations divided by a common language"

gained popularity despite its obscure and controversial origin.

We were told that American spellings and lingo were symbolic of American democracy versus the puerile English aristocracy. 

And that Americans loved direct speech instead of the convoluted indirect of the British. Apparently Americans frowned on typical English signboards like:

"Walking on this fresh lawn is strictly prohibited"

and preferred to write:

"New lawn - Don't walk!"

And then there were the simpler American spellings. Apparently American tennis players used their rackets rather than racquets (which my Father proudly hung up on our wall at Muthukur). For Father, 'racket' meant quite a different thing...surprisingly when two American youngsters meet, they don't ask:

"What is your job?"

but seem to prefer:

"What is your racket?"

There was but one Americanism I loved much as a young teacher who always hated exams from either end. I didn't like Father's standard English:

"Evaluate the answer-scripts"

which sounded false to me...evaluate had something to do with 'value' which none of our answer-scripts ever had. The alternative:

"Correct the answer-scripts"

sounded hypocritical...I never 'corrected' them...just gave them some marks...

The Americanism for it:

"Check the scripts!"

sounded to me very laudable...'check' being such a lazy and blanket Americanism we learned early on and loved.

Pretty soon we were told that Americans were being perverse with their language...just to be different from their British ancestors...saying, 'apartment' instead of the simpler 'flat', and 'elevator' instead of 'lift'.

And when they came to their own invention, they didn't call it:

"Stairlift"

like their famous 'sidewalk', but preferred to call it:

"Escalator'

Nowadays 'escalate' doesn't have the meaning of lifting up a man or woman or dog, but simply means complaining to a higher animal in the hierarchy food chain.

The first we heard of feminisms in American English was never to write Miss or Mrs but Ms.

But no one taught us how to pronounce it. It varied from: 'Mizz' to 'Mess'.

And then the chairman. We were told to never write or speak of chairmen but only chairpersons. But of course, it is always a 'charwoman'...never a 'charperson'.

The first sentence in our Civics book was:

"Man is a social animal"

And in our Politics book it was:

"Man is a political animal"

Both were attributed to Aristotle in whose times women didn't perhaps take up civics or politics as their 'arts' subjects.

No woman, American or British or even Indian, likes to be called an 'animal'...Aristotle would be hooted and booted by ladies.

And of course man is the famous 'naked ape'...happily.

But woman???


...Posted by Ishani

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What a Shame! - Repeat Telecast

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Late one evening in 1968 in the Faculty Club of IIT KGP, I was playing badminton (mixed doubles) under floodlights. On the other side of the court was Mrs Dhar, fiftyish, not often seen in the Club. Prof and Mrs Dhar were just back from their umpteenth trip to England, he with his perennial pipe in his mouth, and she not very comely but free.

Unfortunately, while tackling a long shot, I slipped, took a tumble, fell down like a ton of bricks, sprained an ankle, and what was worse, my bat broke into two at its neck.

On seeing my spectacular dive and its aftermath, Mrs Dhar shook her head gravely and exclaimed:

"O, What a shame! What a shame!! What a shame!!!"

As I retired hurt and limped back into the Hall for the first-aid box, I was seething with anger, humiliation, and was about to break down at the ass I made of myself and more so, the word, 'shame' lingering in my ears...I was boiling inside and almost wished to get back and ask her:

"What is so shameful in a sports injury, my dear Ma'am?"

But as usual, post-eventful thoughts of delayed repartees only make matters worse. Hundreds are the times when I was in bed and thought of a juicy retort in vain....like closing the doors of the stable after the horses have bolted.


It was only much much later that I figured that "What a shame!" is an idiom like "What a pity!", neither of which has anything to do with shame or pity as such but a remorseful way of consoling: "Isn't that too unfortunate!"

And I felt sorry for being so angry with Mrs Dhar and felt like apologizing to her for my misunderstanding...

So, it has always been with me vis-a-vis colloquial English when I went to a high-brow place like KGP from a University Town in AP where we never conversed in English and all the English we knew was learned from our text books of the Victorian era...Queen's English.


Walking along the Scholar's Avenue (a big hyperbole) in the early days of my sojourn there I used to routinely hear the undergraduates cycling along and throwing the word: 'bastard' as if it was an endearment. At first I was stunned that no one took offense but rather enjoyed. And by and by I got inured to it.


They also had a feminine gender to it: 

"That b***ch turned me down"

'Bloody' and 'Damn' flowed like coke in their talks. 

But everyone wasn't taking them kindly. My senior colleague X got into hot waters trying to imitate the slang-lang of the UGs. There was this comely and cute student in our Phy Dept, very sincere and studious, but dressed in what he considered inappropriate wear...jeans and tops and bobbed auburn hair...an anathema to his middle class mores. And she was obviously from an upcountry Army background, daughter of a Colonel at the least. And X disapproved of her thoroughly as he used to tell us in the canteen.

One day, in the Class Room in 1970, while taking Roll Call he halted and asked her:

"Why were you absent yesterday?"

"Sir, I was unwell, sir"

"You are a DAMN liar! I saw you in the market"

That was all...she wasn't one to take it in a class room from a teacher whom I guess she didn't respect too much...she got up and walked out of the class...straight to our HoD, HNB's, Office.

We heard that X was summoned to HNB's Office after the class was over and asked to apologize to her in private for an insult he dumped on her in public...HNB was Victorian in his English like the old school...

X apparently excused himself from the course which was passed on to a lesser mortal.

The sharp ejaculation: "Shit!" was a much later import to KGP. I heard it first from Dr Ghosh Dostidar of GG (the one who looks nowadays like a clone of Buddha Babu) while playing contract bridge in the Faculty Hostel. He was just back from Canada after completing his 5-year Ph D program and told me that ladies in Canada in the 1960s, when they have an urge to use this swear word, modify it and exclaim:

"Oh, Sh...oooot!"

So it was considered not lady-like even in Canada then. But by the 1980s I used to hear it routinely from boys and girls on the Scholars Avenue.

And the other day here I was in the street-corner Medical Shop waiting for my turn for this young Software Lady on her way back home to finish her shopping. Which she did elaborately and paid the cash to the shopkeeper and jumped down the stairs in a hurry to get back into her car. But I saw that in her hurry she forgot to pick up her medicine bag which she left on the counter. 

And, being the chivalrous old fool I am, I called out:

"Ma'am! Your medicines!"

And she turned back and ran up the stairs cursing:

"Oh! Shit!!"

...Posted by Ishani

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1 comment:

The Narcissist said...

Thank you so much for this post. I had used the expression "what a shame" on one of my facebook statuses and a couple of friends just took off on me questioning how I could use the phrase for someone as distinguished as Michael Phelps. Was searching for something to back my point up and your post was the first one I found. :)

You have an interesting blog, sir. Would come back during my leisure time and read more of it.

Games Old Men Play - Repeat Teelcast

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Here is a game I often play...typically:

Ask anyone who has seen him and they will agree with my boast that my son is a handsome youth @ 30...he inherited his glowing fair skin from his mom, good height (almost 6') from his paternal ancestors, and his toothy smile from his gran'pa.

On the other hand I inherited my puny physique from my maternal side. At 68 I am dark, average height, grumpy and gray-haired (whatever is left of it).

This noon when our local Supermarket was devoid of customers, we both went in for some shopping and, after entering, we split, he with his basket and I for my Sprite.

Fetching my bottle and sipping it I moved over to the cash counter manned by a short dour girl of around 20 and started chatting her up: about the heat and dust of Hyderabad, the unavailability of Knorr Thick Tomato Soup, poor quality of string beans, and in general bitching...

She was obviously sullen and unresponsive, saying 'ya' or 'ok' or just nodding her unwilling head about various axes...

Suddenly her face brightened, an inviting glow replacing the bored gloom, and shaking me off as it were.

I knew at once that my son has finished his shopping and was standing behind me with his basket full of goodies.

And I recalled with pleasure our Autocrat's lines:

Sweet was her smile, --- not for me;
Alas when woman looks too kind,
Just turn your foolish head and see, ---
Some youth is walking close behind!

...Posted by Ishani

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