D's Tricycle - Repeat Telecast

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Here is yet another Independence Day.

I was 4 when India gained its independence and celebrated it like nobody's business. I recall peeping through the window of our Village Home at the surging crowds in the morning. It looked as if every man in the Village was out on the streets. My Father was away from home, probably in his school, assisting his HM unfurl our nascent Flag without a hitch. The streets were awash with the tricolor and ablast with Vandemataram. Father returned home, his pocket full of 'lemon drops'.

Talking of 1947, here is a cute vignette of the working day of a New York City shipping magnate around then:

...Up in the morning bright and early at his Long Island home. The bath. The shave. The eggs. The cereal. The coffee. The drive to the station. The 8.15. The cigar. The New York Times. The arrival at the Pennsylvania terminus. The morning's work. The lunch. The afternoon's work. The cocktail. The 5.50. The drive from the station. The return home. The kiss for the wife and the tots, the pat for the welcoming dog. The shower. The change into something loose. The well-earned dinner. The quiet evening. Bed...

Unlike London, I haven't been much in NYC, except through PGW, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain (once in a while)....and Saswat.

Saswat has recently moved from NYC and is awfully nostalgic about it. I guess his lifestyle there too is well encapsulated in the above PGW-para.

 My yesterday's post ended with the sentence:

"And that was my first and last venture with tricycles..."

Not exactly true. There is this baffling encounter I had with another tricycle:

In 1974, I was living in Qrs C1-97 at IIT KGP as a bachelor of 31. And my friend NP and his family were in Qrs C1-116. If you think they were 19 Qrs away from us, you don't know your KGP Campus well although I described its weird numerology many times earlier. The numbering is not spatially ordered but temporally...I mean Qrs C1-116 was the 19th Qrs to be built after C1-97. The Civil Engineer (Construction) must have been a hobby-Relativist since space and time were not all that different for him.

NP's Qrs were in the same lane as ours but only 7 Qrs away. NP's son, D, was a cute kid of 4 then. And his dad had gifted him an equally cute and sturdy tricycle. And it was D's practice to occasionally visit our Qrs and ring his bell...tring tring tring... to draw my attention away from my woolgathering sessions.

That was a rather late evening of our Independence Day and the roads were quiet. D arrived, rang his bell and suggested we visit the Hijli Station, he on his tricycle and me on my bicycle. Not exactly...it was NP's bicycle which I was using then.  It was a pre-World War II machine, a supermassive Humber of 24" frame. It was as heavy as I was and more than half as tall. Heavy though it was, once you mount and step on it, it would race like a mustang and fly like an eagle. It has a wiki-entry all its own.

I was game to his suggestion thinking that he and his dad were routinely visiting Hijli station and D was adept at it. That is what happens if you are a bachelor.

So, we two started on our respective vehicles, he trying to outrace me and I falling behind to humor him. By the time we were nearing the precincts of what is now the Tata Steel Stadium, D got down and sat on the grass by the side of the road. I asked him what happened and he said he was tired and couldn't ride any further.

That was fine with me and I suggested we take some rest and drive back home. But he said he didn't inform his parents where he was going on his solo expedition and so has to rush home before search parties start off. I was then getting worried since there were no telephones and it was quite dark by then. And the road was as desolate a place as the Dandakaranya it used to be called.

And D said he was too tired to walk either....meaning that I had to take him koley (give him  a shoulder-ride).

KGP campus was notorious then for cycle thieves. I couldn't leave our vehicles there and try and shoulder him all the way back home...both the cycles were expensive. I couldn't leave him there with the Humber and lug his tricycle home first and come back and take him as a pillion on the Humber, since he said he was getting scared. And there looked to be no practicable solution to this multi-mode-resource-constrained-project-scheduling problem.

I then recalled the much easier problem we used to play with in our childhood...the farmer, his tiger, his goat, his paan-leaf bundle, the river he had to cross with them all safely without each eating up the other wherever possible, and  the single boat that could only hold one passenger other than the rower...

I recall vividly our Humber-Tricycle conundrum after nearly  40 years...but I forgot how we solved it ultimately.

Let it stay as one of those

Locutus Interruptus

 

stories...you can have your pick...

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...Posted by Ishani

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Grandfather's Old Ram - Repeat Telecast

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...And this has to do not so much with the history of countries like India, where, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a sense of the authentic was indispensable to the sense of self and the past, and where it has also been imbricated with a sense of hybridity and evolving plurality that has characterized its cultures for centuries, but with Western history, where 'authenticity', or 'purity', and 'hybridity' have not only existed, since the nineteenth century (if not since the Enlightenment), in mutually exclusive intellectual and cultural compartments, but where, more recently, after Auschwitz, 'authenticity' is associated with extreme right-wing politics and the destructive nature of masculine fantasy...

Hmmm!

I better agree wholeheartedly with the author there since this Hanuman-tail sentence, picked at random from an erudite essay by a well-known living and highly respected Indian author and scholar, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

I was curious and counted the number of commas in that single sentence...it came out to be 14, give or take a couple. And there are four words under inverted commas as my Father used to call them.  And there are 5 em-braced words. And I see my Blogger Spellcheck, flummoxed with 3 strange words she didn't know what to do with, decided to take no chances and underlined them in wavy red ink...she is wrong...they are very much there in Webster.

I salute my Guardian Angel for making me an unwilling Physics Teacher rather than an unwilling English Teacher. I thought I would have enjoyed teaching English. Now I see I was absolutely wrong, for, I would have had to read, write, speak, and perhaps teach essays upon essays filled with such convoluted, involuted, and pervoluted sentences. 

God! 

I recall the plight of the only Genius English Teacher I met (at IIT KGP). He was asked to write a 30-page original literary criticism if he wanted to be confirmed in his post as a lowly Lecturer. He quit after two years to an unknown place on an unknown night to an unknown future. His name was Basudeb Ghosh and while he was at KGP he was the darling of students there.

On the other hand, while a tough subject to do original research in, Physics is the easiest to teach. All you needed during my time was a chalk-piece and duster...you start with an equation and the rest follows like hangover follows a binge.

And my Guardian Angel took immense care of me even after I quit Physics. 

She said:

"Take to mind-boggling blogging!" 

(sorry there...'blog' itself is the ugliest word in the English language and I prepended it with an even uglier epithet)  

During my Shakespeare Uncle's time, there were the following options for a lover of English:

1. Write for a  doubtful living

2. Teach for an assured but boring living

3. Do a Ph. D. in English and become a Scholar or Professor or a Literary Critic for journals (for a frugal living)

4. Do anything else for a living and read English for pleasure.

Nowadays there is an avenue unthinkable to my Uncle...

5. Blog...Devil take the hindmost...you may acquire readers or not...just blog away.


This series of posts  was originally intended to be stories of my cycles. But after the first quote from RKN where his elder brother took a bloody tumble and was slapped by his reluctant father, I lost my way and it is threatening to become Mark Twain's

"Grandfather's Old Ram":

 

Mark Twain, Roughing It, Chapter 53, 1872.    Portrait of Samuel Clemens, 1835 Courtesy The Mark Twain House, Hartford Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather’s old ram–but they always added that I must not mention the matter unless Jim was drunk at the time–just comfortably and sociably drunk. They kept this up until my curiosity was on the rack to hear the story. I got to haunting Blaine; but it was of no use, the boys always found fault with his condition; he was often moderately but never satisfactorily drunk. I never watched a man’s condition with such absorbing interest, such anxious solicitude; I never so pined to see a man uncompromisingly drunk before. At last, one evening I hurried to his cabin, for I learned that this time his situation was such that even the most fastidious could find no fault with it–he was tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk–not a hiccup to mar his voice, not a cloud upon his brain thick enough to obscure his memory. As I entered, he was sitting upon an empty powder-keg, with a clay pipe in one hand and the other raised to command silence. His face was round, red, and very serious; his throat was bare and his hair tumbled; in general appearance and costume he was a stalwart miner of the period. On the pine table stood a candle, and its dim light revealed “the boys” sitting here and there on bunks, candle-boxes, powder-kegs, etc. They said: “Sh–! Don’t speak–he’s going to commence.” I found a seat at once, and Blaine said: I don’t reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more bullier old ram than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from Illinois–got him of a man by the name of Yates–Bill Yates–maybe you might have heard of him; his father was a deacon–Baptist–and he was a rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old Thankful Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with my grandfather when he moved west. Seth Green was prob’ly the pick of the flock; he married a Wilkerson–Sarah Wilkerson–good cretur, she was–one of the likeliest heifers that was ever raised in old Stoddard, everybody said that knowed her. She could heft a bar’l of flour as easy as I can flirt a flapjack. And spin? Don’t mention it! Independent? Humph! When Sile Hawkins come a browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn’t trot in harness alongside of her. You see, Sile Hawkins was–no, it warn’t Sile Hawkins, after all–it was a galoot by the name of Filkins–I disremember his first name; but he was a stump–come into pra’r meeting drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuz he thought it was a primary; and old deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window and he lit on old Miss Jefferson’s head, poor old filly. She was a good soul–had a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadn’t any, to receive company in; it warn’t big enough, and when Miss Wagner warn’t noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while t’ other one was looking as straight ahead as a spy-glass. Grown people didn’t mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary. She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it wouldn’t work, somehow–the cotton would get loose and stick out and look so kind of awful that the children couldn’t stand it no way. She was always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. So somebody would have to hunch her and say, “Your game eye has fetched loose, Miss Wagner dear”–and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in again–wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird’s egg, being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company. But being wrong side before warn’t much difference, anyway; becuz her own eye was sky-blue and the glass one was yaller on the front side, so whichever way she turned it it didn’t match nohow. Old Miss Wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was. When she had a quilting, or Dorcas S’iety at her house she gen’ally borrowed Miss Higgins’s wooden leg to stump around on; it was considerable shorter than her other pin, but much sheminded that. She said she couldn’t abide crutches when she had company, becuz they were so slow; said when she had company and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hump herself. She was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow Miss Jacops’s wig–Miss Jacops was the coffin-peddler’s wife–a ratty old buzzard, he was, that used to go roosting around where people was sick, waiting for ‘em; and there that old rip would sit all day, in the shade, on a coffin that he judged would fit the can’idate; and if it was a slow customer and kind of uncertain, he’d fetch his rations and a blanket along and sleep in the coffin nights. He was anchored out that way, in frosty weather, for about three weeks, once, before old Robbins’s place, waiting for him; and after that, for as much as two years, Jacops was not on speaking terms with the old man, on account of his disapp’inting him. He got one of his feet froze, and lost money, too, becuz old Robbins took a favorable turn and got well. The next time Robbins got sick, Jacops tried to make up with him, and varnished up the same old coffin and fetched it along; but old Robbins was too many for him; he had him in, and ‘peared to be powerful weak; he bought the coffin for ten dollars and Jacops was to pay it back and twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn’t like the coffin after he’d tried it. And then Robbins died, and at the funeral he bursted off the lid and riz up in his shroud and told the parson to let up on the performances, becuz he could not stand such a coffin as that. You see he had been in a trance once       Mark Twain at Villa di Quarto, Florence, Italy, 1904 Courtesy of The Mark Twain Project, Bancroft Library, Berkeley before, when he was young, and he took the chances on another, cal’lating that if he made the trip it was money in his pocket, and if he missed fire he couldn’t lose a cent. And by George he sued Jacops for the rhino and got jedgment; and he set up the coffin in his back parlor and said he ‘lowed to take his time, now. It was always an aggravation to Jacops, the way that miserable old thing acted. He moved back to Indiany pretty soon–went to Wellsville–Wellsville was the place the Hogadorns was from. Mighty fine family. Old Maryland stock. Old Squire Hogadorn could carry around more mixed licker, and cuss better than most any man I ever see. His second wife was the widder Billings–she that was Becky Martin; her dam was deacon Dunlap’s first wife. Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and died in grace–et up by the savages. They ethim, too, poor feller–biled him. It warn’t the custom, so they say, but they explained to friends of his’n that went down there to bring away his things, that they’d tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good out of ‘em–and so it annoyed all his relations to find out that that man’s life was fooled away just out of a dern’d experiment, so to speak. But mind you, there ain’t anything ever reely lost; everything that people can’t understand and don’t see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake; Prov’dence don’t fire no blank ca’tridges, boys. That there missionary’s substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu’ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbacue. Nothing ever fetched them but that. Don’t tell me it was an accident that he was biled. There ain’t no such a thing as an accident. When my uncle Lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or drunk, or suthin, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the third story and broke the old man’s back in two places. People said it was an accident. Much accident there was about that. He didn’t know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object. If he hadn’t been there the Irishman would have been killed. Nobody can ever make me believe anything different from that. Uncle Lem’s dog was there. Why didn’t the Irishman fall on the dog? Becuz the dog would a seen him a coming and stood from under. That’s the reason the dog warn’t appinted. A dog can’t be depended on to carry out a special providence. Mark my words it was a put-up thing. Accidents don’t happen, boys. Uncle Lem’s dog–I wish you could a seen that dog. He was a reglar shepherd–or ruther he was part bull and part shepherd–splendid animal; belonged to parson Hagar before Uncle Lem got him. Parson Hagar belonged to the Western Reserve Hagars; prime family; his mother was a Watson; one of his sisters married a Wheeler; they settled in Morgan county, and he got nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains wove in, and people come a hundred mile to ‘tend the funeral. There was fourteen yards in the piece. She wouldn’t let them roll him up, but planted him just so–full length. The church was middling small where they preached the funeral, and they had to let one end of the coffin stick out of the window. They didn’t bury him–they planted one end, and let him stand up, same as a monument. And they nailed a sign on it and put–put on–put on it–sacred to–the m-e-m-o-r-y–of fourteen y-a-r-d-s–of three-ply–car–-pet–containing all that was–m-o-r-t-a-l–of–of–W-i-l-l-i-a-m–W-h-e–” Jim Blaine had been growing gradually drowsy and drowsier–his head nodded, once, twice, three times–dropped peacefully upon his breast, and he fell tranquilly asleep. The tears were running down the boys’ cheeks–they were suffocating with suppressed laughter–and had been from the start, though I had never noticed it. I perceived that I was “sold.” I learned then that Jim Blaine’s peculiarity was that whenever he reached a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather’s old ram–and the mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever heard him get, concerning it. He always maundered off, interminably, from one thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he fell asleep. What the thing was that happened to him and his grandfather’s old ram is a dark mystery to this day, for nobody has ever yet found out.

http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_story.html




...Posted by Ishani

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Autocrat - Repeat Telecast

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The other book I often take out from my book-shelf for consulting is Oliver Wendell Holmes's 'Autocrat of the Breakfast Table'.

This morning Pratik-sir wrote me complimenting me (and himself) on the mention of Stradivarius Violin in my yesterday's post.

Well, I am not a music buff, nor a book-lover like him with a couple of thousand books born to, like him. 

I read about this antique instrument in my Autocrat.   

I have told the story of my infatuation with the Autocrat a dozen times, so one more last comprehensive time shouldn't hurt.

It was in 1960 I first saw the name: Oliver Wendell Holmes in print. His used to be the leading one-liner in the 'Quotable Quotes' page of Readers Digest when the magazine was at the pinnacle of its Cold War Glory.

I then borrowed a copy of the Autocrat from a lending library at Vizagh and read it with difficulty; and paid a huge fine for not returning it in time. And then forgot about it. 

A decade later, in 1970, I saw a frazzled paperback of this book in our fledgling Technology Club Library, which was a one-rack affair with open access and no Librarian...the Accountant used to double as one (the so-called Library soon evaporated into thin air). The cover of the book had a cute picture of a shaded cup-and-saucer. The inscription inside was: PCS Krishnaiah. I knew this connoisseur of life fairly well. He was in the EE Dept and was one of our few Ph D's then from Imperial College, London, where he went back. I don't know why he had gifted his copy to our Club Library...maybe because those days Air India was not allowing anything but a small suitcase in its hold.

On seeing it I recalled my younger decade and bargained with the Librarian that I would gift 2 books in exchange for this one. He couldn't care less about the titles of his books and jumped at the doubling offer...I got rid of my copy of Emma and Great Expectations without any regret...I read the first one but not the second...and had no intention to do so...they were recycled versions of my teenage favorite, Pride & Prejudice.

And this time I enjoyed the Autocrat thoroughly and tried it on DB. He flipped through it and returned it saying it was too heavy for him and went back to his CG Coefficients of the Lorentz Group which he considered 'light'...one man's meat is another's fish...

I then tried it on many of my friends who used to borrow and lose my 50 PGWs...but they didn't even read the first half-page.

A decade later I re-read it and enjoyed it even more. And in 1984 my friend NP was traveling to Delhi and was scheduled to visit my IAS B-i-L for an hour at his home. I then requested him to carry my (PCSK's) copy and hand it over to him with best wishes thinking that a compulsive reader like him would enjoy it. After 5 more years his wife and their Class XI son were visiting us at KGP for a week...so I rang him up (@ Rs 50) asking him to send my copy of the Autocrat via his family...and he asked:

"What Autocrat? Never heard of him"

When my nephew reached KGP, I asked him about the book and he replied that his dad has no recollection of any such book at all. So I recalled RKN's lines too late:

...All of us love to keep our books, and also share the delight of good reading with others. This is an impossible combination and turns out to be a painful experiment. If you love your book, don't lend it anyone on earth. This really ought to be one's guiding principle. You cannot lend your books and yet have them just as you cannot have your cake and eat it...

The news that my copy of the Autocrat has been lost forever was a shock to me. And it was nearing a decade since I read it last and I was pining to re-read it. So, in 1990 I went to our Central Library and found from the catalog cabinets that it indeed has one copy of the book. I took down the Call and Accession numbers and requested Banga Babu, our Assistant Librarian par excellence, to tell me if it had been issued to anyone. He took two days and went through the huge Registers and announced that it is not issued to anyone, so it must be in the racks. And for a whole month I was diligently searching all the Humanities shelves for it, with despair and disgust. 

And gave it up.

Then there was this Physic Topper, PL, who was doing his GR Project with me. He was a millionaire's son from Bombay and I begged him to get me a copy of the book whatever it cost from the Bombay Bookshops, or xerox the whole book for me from any Library in Bombay at my expense. In return I simply got a letter from him asking me to kindly collect all his gold and silver medals and checks from the Exam Section and send them to him by Regd Post immediately, at my expense, of course. Which I did the very next day...showing I am not vindictive, to students at least.

Meanwhile Edwin Taylor from MIT became a close friend of mine and I was doing a good turn to him popularizing his Spacetime Software at KGP and also showing him how his software can be used to solve and demonstrate 2-dimensional Relativity problems. And he was egging me on to tell him more about what I was doing with it. So, I thought I had him in my pocket and requested him to send me a copy of the Autocrat whatever it costs. (Both Edwin and Oliver Wendell Holmes hail from Boston, a century apart). 

And he started talking of his forthcoming GR book with John A Wheeler.

At last I tried the good old arm-twisting on him. By then my longest-ever paper in AJP (with my Project Student TRR) on Spacetime Software's Applications was ready for submission to AJP. I told Edwin that I would gladly send him a preprint if and only if he sends me a copy of the Autocrat soonest. It worked like a charm. Apparently he drove to Harvard Square at once and scoured all the bookshops there, only to find that it had been out of print for a long while (Internet and Amazon were yet to get popular in Boston). So, he took the trouble of going to the used-book-stores there and finally got a copy circa 1885. And he sent it to me by express mail, as a gift, of course.

When I opened the envelope my joy knew no bounds...it was a gilt-edged hard-cover golden book, fairly well-preserved. I read it to my heart's content and kept it safely aside.

I asked Edwin if he read that book before sending it to me and he wrote:

"I tried the first couple of pages...I don't like authors who pontificate"

And in 1994, I went to Madras for a day's visit to my IAS B-i-L's place where he was posted back from Delhi. As soon as I reached there, my nephew (then in MBBS) came in holding my good old copy of the Autocrat in his hands high above his head, saying:

"Here is your Autocrat, Uncle, which I discovered deep inside my dad's book-rack while packing up his belongings"

And I hugged my lost copy like a lost and recovered baby.

Back at KGP I was in the CL one morning and Banga Babu greeted me:

"Here is the copy you wanted, Prof Sastry....Prof GB returned it on his retirement saying he couldn't finish it"

So, I got it issued...

You see, I then suddenly had 3 copies of the book at various stages of disintegration. I read the CL's copy a couple of times before returning it when I myself retired in 2005. And by then DB's dot-product finished her MA (English) and was gifting me many books like RKN's 'A Story-Teller's World' and a 'Collection of Poe Stories'. And I had to give her  a return gift...so I gave her my (PCSK's) copy of the Autocrat. And after a month asked her how she liked it. And she replied:

"Started reading it a fortnight back...finished two pages with difficulty"  

So, I was left with the gilt-edged 150-year-old copy from Harvard Square...and like every other of my books it went to Nellore where it stayed unopened as junk before my son brought it to Hyderabad 3 years later.

By then its pages had become brittle and I was afraid they would crumble . So, I took it delicately to my book-binder to xerox the whole book and get a copy hard-bound. He flipped it delicately and returned it to me saying it can't be xeroxed because the pages would come apart and break like papads and I would end up without either the original or a copy. I grabbed it at once from him and it is now in my book-shelf.

Whenever I open it, which is often, I see the inscription on its first page:

Jennie B Joy, Dec 25th 1885

in black ink and Cyrillic font.

And I lapse into a reverie wondering who this Jennie Joy could be, what she looked like, why she bought this unreadable book, did she try it out, who she bequeathed it to, who sold it away to a used-book shop and why...was he or she in dire need of urgent cash...so sorry and so glad...

...Posted by Ishani

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RKN, Ford & God - Repeat Telecast

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...Some days later his cycle-shop friend got him into trouble with my father. One afternoon my brother had come home, gone directly into his room, and locked himself in. Shortly came the cycle-shop keeper, who had been all smiles the other day, now looking grim, propelling along with difficulty a cycle with damaged handle bars and awry wheels. He gesticulated and shouted wildly, and the commotion he created brought the entire family out, including my father, who came downstairs. My brother had taken a cycle on hire, had fallen off, damaged the machine, quietly put it back in its stand over the gutter, and come away without even paying the hire-charges. My father mollified the shopkeeper and sent him away, then knocked fiercely on my brother's door and got him out. His nose was blood-covered and full of scratches, his elbows were bleeding, and his clothes had blood marks and mud stains. My father glared angrily at him and demanded an explanation. He gave him a slap but before he could do further damage to him, the women screamed and rushed to his protection. My grandmother was particularly vociferous, and my father retreated to his sanctum upstairs, unwilling to have a confrontation with his mother-in-law...


...RKN in 'My Days'


So, even RKN's HM-Father was scared of his mother-in-law...to say nothing of my own feeble HM Father, who, as I said in a earlier post, used to refer to his mom-in-law as Hitler (behind her back):

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2014/11/banshees-repeat-telecast.html


There are two books I often take out from my small book-shelf to steal from for my blogs. One is RKN's 'My Days'. This thin 185 page book of his memoirs was first published in 1973 when he was 67. I had bought it in 1975 from A H Wheelers on their bookstall on Platform # 2 at KGP station for Rs 6.50 only. And covered it with a calender page. Its pages have now become as brittle as the Mexican Tortilla papads my son fed me the other day.


Also, its pages are dotted with wormholes of all shapes and sizes that drill through many pages at a go. So, I have to handle it with great care. I could ask my son to order a new copy for me from Flipkart...but I don't... because my ancient copy has a nostalgia value for me.

After I read it a couple of times, I gave it to DB for browsing. He liked it so much that he gave it to his mississ and his dot-product both of who are MAs (English) from Jadavpur. They didn't want to return it. So, one day DB offered me a deal...could I exchange it with any book I like in his Physics Collection? I said ok and opted for his Advanced Quantum Mechanics of J J Sakurai which didn't have an Indian Edition then and the American one was too expensive for my pocket. 

So I swapped My Days with his AQM. 

One night around 9 PM Prof AM visited my Qrs and I could see he was completely shaken. A little probing revealed that AM's son flunked his IIT JEE and AM was shell-shocked.

I then quoted to him from memory how RKN's HM-Father reacted when RKN failed in English and had to sit at home for a year:

...I had been certain of failure in these two subjects (physics and chemistry) but, as if by a miracle, I had somehow passed in them though not with flying colours. On the contrary, I had failed where I was most confident --- English. I failed so miserably and completely that everyone wondered if I was literate at all. My father, in spite of his strict attitudes in school matters, had one pleasant quality --- he never bothered about the examination results. He always displayed sympathy for a fallen candidate; he had no faith in the examination-system at all. But even he was forced to exclaim in surprise, 'Stupid fellow, you have failed in English! Why?...

Prof AM asked me where he could get the book where this quote can be found. I told him that it is in My Days and my copy of it was available with DB. He then straight drove to DB's Qrs and borrowed it for a day (DB was very particular he return it by next evening suspecting that AM would nationalize it).

Next morning AM came to my Qrs and thanked me for the book. And went to DB's place and returned it. 

A day before my retirement I went to DB's room with his copy of AQM saying that he can keep it too since I am done with Physics...and DB returned my My Days in the afternoon. You may wonder why either DB or AM wouldn't buy a cheap copy of My Days which has perhaps been in continuous print. 

I don't know the answer to this...it may be like the Telugu proverb:

"Shankham lo posthe ne teertham"

meaning:

"Water becomes holy only if it is dispensed out of the Puja conch-shell"

Or, maybe it is like the Stradivarius Violin whose price increases exponentially with time as its timber (and timbre) ages.

My copy of 'My Days' went to Nellore with my luggage while I was forced to flee flying to Hyderabad on my retirement. I guess it was at Nellore where it stayed unopened for three years in a cardboard box that moths read it to their hearts' content. 
  

Ford & God 

 ...Having published many novels, essays and short stories, Narayan is credited with bringing Indian writing to the rest of the world. While he has been regarded as one of India's greatest writers of the twentieth century, critics have also described his writings with adjectives such as charming, harmless and benign.^[98] Narayan has also come in for criticism from later writers, particularly of Indian origin, who have classed his writings as having a pedestrian style with a shallow vocabulary and a narrow vision.^[13] According to Shashi Tharoor, Narayan's subjects are similar to those of Jane Austen as they both deal with a very small section of society. However, he adds that while Austen's prose was able to take those subjects beyond ordinariness, Narayan's was not.^[99] A similar opinion is held by Shashi Deshpande who characterizes Narayan's writings as pedestrian and naive because of the simplicity of his language and diction, combined with the lack of any complexity in the emotions and behaviours of his characters^{[100] "}

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._K._Narayan 


Upon reading this paragraph I recalled a slightly off-color joke that was doing the rounds in our Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP:

Henry Ford went to Heaven for all the good that he did to humanity and confronted God, who asked him:

"What is your biggest achievement?"

"Making a low-cost automobile that changed the American road scene forever....What is yours?"

"Making Eve"

"No good...the design is all wrong"

"What is wrong with it?"

"The driver's seat is not comfortable"

"But many more people ride my model than yours!"

...Posted by Ishani

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A Teacher's Nightmares - Repeat Telecast

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I always wanted to see ghosts...who doesn't? But I haven't succeeded...yet.

Prof R K Mukherjee, our amne-samne neighbor at KGP, was full of stories of real ghosts he saw in their ancestral home in Chandannagore:

http://fatakgorasarbojonin.com/img/chandannagar_strand.jpg

Maybe it is because of its long-lost French connection. RKM had a way of telling his stories...a good ghost story needs a master-raconteur.

A wacky novel I read when I was young was 'Rebecca' by Daphne du Maurier...ladies seem to excel in this art form. Wiki tells me something I didn't know about its opening and closing lines:

...The famous opening line of the book "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is an iambic hexameter. The last line of the book "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea" is also in metrical form; almost but not quite an anapestic tetrameter....

Don't ask me about prosody in English...my Shakespeare Uncle used to talk about iambic pentameter. He should know. Wiki again:

"A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM"

As Bertie would say: 

"yes, yes, yes..not in the mood 

now"

Our Bollywood chaps tried a poor clone of Rebecca in my youth. The 1964 film was so-so though some haunting songs were hits...like this one by Hemanta-da:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gMhbWeo30o

That was a big digression...

When I was in school I never had any dreams...I was playing so much during the day that I hit the bed and never woke up till cold water from the surai was sprinkled on my face in the morning.

Nightmares started when I was appearing for my final exams in my University. The recurrent one was that I arrived late at the Exam Hall and was driven away. It never happened in reality though.

The next set of nightmares were to do with my unending train journeys between Gudur and KGP. As luck would have it, my train was scheduled to arrive at Gudur at 2.30 AM in the dead of the night...and at 3.30 AM at KGP. So my sleep, if any, was fitful and was always punctuated by nightmares that the train left Gudur (or KGP) while I was slumbering. So, no sleep was really possible.

This did come true once when I was traveling alone by the Janata Express to KGP in 1973. I was on the upper berth and was feverish. I woke up at Balasore and asked the lower chaps if KGP had arrived...they said no...next big halt. I then turned the other side and slept off. And when I woke up again and asked if KGP arrived yet, they said...yes, and gone too. I turned the other side and slept off and when I woke up next it was Uluberia. I got down and returned to KGP by daybreak by the First Local.

My niece, Madhuri, was even more troubled. She completed her B Tech (CSE) at IIT KGP and packed up her huge luggage, took a rickshaw, and went to the KGP station at 9 AM sharp to catch the good-bye Falaknuma Express to Vizagh. They told her that it hadn't arrived at Howrah yet on its onward journey and would eventually be at KGP by 5 PM hopefully on its return trip. So, she dumped her luggage in the Cloak Room and went back to her IG Hall for a quiet lunch and siesta. The lunch was over by noon and she was into her siesta by 12.30 PM. And then she started having recurrent nightmares in broad daylight that her Falaknuma was leaving the platform while she was chasing it unsuccessfully. Every ten minutes. After an hour, she couldn't sleep anymore and went back to the KGP station and waited there on the bench till 10 PM.

After I joined as a Teacher at KGP I had a different set of regular nightmares.

One was that I forgot that I had  a Lecture Class and went there unprepared and had to face a class of 60 rowdy ChE students. And that I was booed and shooed.

This never happened in reality though. But I get this nightmare even now and wake up with a heartbeat of 100 or more. And realize that I retired 10 years ago and had no need to teach any longer. The relief is so immense that I get up and hum a tune.

The other one was that I went to my MSc Lecture Class fully prepared and raring to teach all the physics I knew...sort of. And found that the kids performed what was then known as Mass-Cut. The class room was empty and remained so for the rest of the hour. I ought to have celebrated this as paid-leave but I was not ripe enough in the beginning.

Much later, when I was ripe enough for it, it did happen towards the end of my duties there. That batch was known affectionately as Murali's batch. This kid, as everyone of his classmates, was very talented, but lost all interest in Physics from his second year when he discovered that his talent lay elsewhere...in making computers dance to his tune. By his 4th year he became such an expert in computers that he had a couple of great offers from Banglaore...he was literally Bangalored...

The 19 or so others were all in a hurry to quit KGP at the end of their fourth year itself without completing their final year. And they were all preparing for GRE, TOEFL, 'apping' to US Univs and composing (remixing) what are piquantly called Suck Letters in the Computer Lab:

http://www.infolanka.com/org/usuniv/suck.htmhttp://www.infolanka.com/org/usuniv/suck.htm

Because, IIT KGP was banning this exodus from the next year onward.

I came to sense this indifference soon after their midsems and was myself looking for an excuse to bunk my own classes. This came one fine morning in October (with a good month to go for the endsems). As I entered the classroom I found only two students (both of them left for the best univs in the US a year later). My joy knew no bounds. And I told them that the syllabus has been 'covered' (instead of being uncovered). And said TaTa ByeBye to the batch.

The relief was like the extraction of a painful tooth...on both sides.

From next year onward, I quit Departmental Teaching and reverted to Jumbo First Year Physics...a different story altogether.

...Posted by Ishani

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