Dichotomy - Repeat Telecast

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http://www.friendsoftibet.org/cartoons/images/shankar_6.jpg

...In France you can live as you like but you have to think as others do; in Germany you have to live as others do but you can think as you like...

...Somerset Maugham


Hmm!

What about My India?

Here you can live as you like and think as you like...indeed you may not think at all...the summum bonum here is supposed to be the Moksha where you pull all thoughts root and branch and throw them in the dustbin, to be replaced by the Bliss of Pure Existence.

Trying...

India is not a melting pot like America...it is an Irish stew where each piece retains its individuality and yet the dish is tasty and wholesome.

Let us take our Soniajee. She was born and raised as a Roman Catholic, married into a family with Parsi roots, yet wears in public a sari without pulling the ghoonghat, most of the time.

The PM of our Eastern neighbor too is always seen wearing a sari in public with the head-veil most of the time.

And now, listen to our Sunanda-da:
 

...A newspaper picture of Mrs Gandhi talking to a victim of the Assam riots intrigued me. The victim, presumably a Bengali-speaking Muslim or Assamese, wore a salwar-kameez with a dupatta across her chest. In contrast, Mrs Gandhi had draped herself in a sari. You might say she is never seen in anything else. But here's the rub. The Italian-born leader of India's Congress Party had decorously pulled the sari-end over her head right up to the front. The bare head of the Assamese/Bengali girl glistened in the picture... 


When I was a kid of 3, two of my aunties were living with us and it was their pleasure to give me my bath on alternate days. One of them always started from the top and went down soaping, while the other did it the other way round...without exception.

Then, the first one combed my hair from back to front before parting it while the other did the other way round. I wondered why.

Towards the end of my stay at IIT KGP I had two neighbors both with Maruti Cars. One of them parked his car head first into his garage and then reversed it when he needed to take it out. The other one first reversed it and parked it so he could start it head first in style.

And in the Lab Exam, half the students first filled up their scripts with aim, apparatus, circuit, observation chart, precautions and stuff for an hour or more and THEN started the wiring; while the other half jumped into the wiring first to see if it works ok and then start writing...no one ever cheated while I was there watching them like a hawk ;)

And so on and so forth in life.

I guess story-writers and bloggers too are divided into two groups:

1. They get the title first and weave a story around it.

2. The others write the story first and then look for a title.

Talking of titles and stories I had this disgusting experience:

Towards the end of 2009, Shyamal, who is a regular contributor to the Now & Again Column of The Statesman sent a blog of mine to its Editor who published it without any change at all. Then another. Then came the blog with the poetic title I chose:

"Rain Drops and Pearls"

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/10/rain-drops-and-pearls.html

And it came out in print with the title:

"Repaid with Interest"

with the last couple of paras clipped away totally.

Repaid with Interest, my foot!

And that was the end of our brief romance...by then the Statesman readers were also fed up with me and my stories and we parted without acrimony.

This reminds me of a young Indian Physicist who left TIFR without a Ph D, went to the US, and did fabulous work missing the Nobel Prize at least thrice...his fault was that he planted the saplings and raised the trees while others walked away with their fruit...when he was not watching.

Thirty years later, he was invited back to give a talk in TIFR and he is said to have started:

"TIFR and I decided to part ways thirty years back...and both of us seem to have done rather well since then"


====================================================================== 

 

...Posted by Ishani


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Aniket's Guest Column - Repeat Telecast

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Teacher Man

This post is and is not about the book of the same name by Frank McCourt. I had half a mind to gift a copy of the book to GPS on his seventieth birthday, but was cautioned by my wife, who had tried reading Angela’s Ashes by the same author and had to put it away after a few pages because she found it too morbid.

So I had to drop that idea.

I was clueless for a few weeks, and also found myself short of time to produce a write-up that GPS requested, which was not a great state of affairs, because I was not enjoying my time on my job, which happens to be trying to teach physics to some unwilling students who are more interested in grades (and girls, which is not necessarily a bad thing) than in the subject.

I had gone to the extent of throwing a student or two out of a particular class, only to be told by the authorities that (a) it doesn’t look good, and (b) the students were having even more fun outside the class, so obviously banishing them from the classroom wasn’t working. Every other trick I tried to engage the attention of my students failed. A joke would make them laugh and get them on my side, but only for a few minutes. They seemed to have a collective amnesia for all instructions, threats and jokes alike, and drove me to despair.

It was one of those days, when I suddenly saw a bit of chalk stick to the board, and slide down its side, halting now and then, until it fell off the board and onto the floor.

For a few seconds, I forgot my class and stood there watching that bit of chalk, and then SK, the worst offender in my class, also joined in, laughing, excited by what he saw. Never mind the fact that he failed the first examination and was pleading unsuccessfully for three grace marks.

For a moment, I was transported back to a sight from almost a decade and a half ago, outside the Central Library at KGP. I was coming from RP Hall, which was the nearest from the institute (and also according to HNA, the reason I was the most frequent latecomer to class). I halted for a moment in the darkness as I watched GPS watching the wind swirling around a bunch of dry leaves and twigs in the corner. He had stopped while coming out and I still remember, in my mind’s eye, the slim silhouette holding a pose for a few brief moments that felt like eternity, and were I an artist of the calibre of Satyajit Ray, I might have reproduced a sketch for you all.

But since I am not, I will have to manage with a comparison of that moment with the scene in American Beauty when a teenaged drug peddler shows off his video of a plastic packet swirling in the wind at a wall.

Coming back to that bit of chalk – for a moment, it felt it united me and my unwilling students in our momentary desire to escape from the chains of the syllabus and our wish to smell the flowers.

The woods are lovely.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qssvnjj5Moo




...Posted by Ishani
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Whither Humber? - Repeat Telecast

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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/07._Camel_Profile,_near_Silverton,_NSW,_07.07.2007.jpg

"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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Cyclic Memories - Repeat Telecast

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http://www.toonpool.com/user/997/files/bum_money_panhandler_all_ever_1002565.jpg

...India, which has announced it will send a space probe to Mars, is now a country with more technological prowess than Britain, and the "best and most beautiful spoken English in the world" is now heard in India, the Telegraph said on Friday...

gps: There, there, I told you so...only, in his quote above, Theodore Dalrymple, not to be confused with William Dalrymple (who has a farmhouse in Mehrauli and a known love-affair with India), forgot to mention that the "best and most beautiful" blogged English in the world is also from India, especially Hyderabad. 

After I lost my Avon Green bicycle the day I bought it, I lost all interest in bikes and life as well...for a couple of days.

Six months after letting me stay in Gokhale Hall where I had food and roof, I was shunted, against my will, to Qrs BF-1/6 (bedroom) by one of those curious anomalies for which IIT KGP has always been famous....like for its collapsible gates.

Now, BF-1/6 (bedroom) didn't have a mess attached to it. But the Warden of Gokahle Hall, Prof G L Sinha, listening to my tale of woe, permitted me to come and eat my meals there as a Paying Guest. 

Now, BF-1/6 (bedroom) is not an easy walking distance from either Gokhale Hall or the Institute Main Building. So, I had got to buy a bicycle. Once bitten, twice shy... Friends suggested that I buy a second or third hand bike in a rotten condition since that would be theft-proof hopefully.

My friend, NCN, found out an M Tech student in JCB Hall who was leaving KGP after his two-year stint and was eager to sell his Hercules bike which he bought it from his senior who bought it from his senior who bought it from his senior...

This bike was as heavy as the good old Humber but didn't have its fiery wings...rather. And I had to lug it up every night to my third floor digs along a stair case that had six landings, for fear of cycle thieves. Everyone in those Flats did so too...even the residents on the ground floor who had a verandah...they had to lug theirs into their Hall and lock them too. A few ardent bike-lovers, when they went home on summer vacation, carried and locked their cycles in their Offices too, tunneling through the collapsible gates when no one was watching.

Everyone those days was talking about the award-winning Vittoria de Sica movie, 'Bicycle Thieves', to console themselves that KGP didn't get the first prize...it went to Italy.

Six months later, a new Warden took over Gokhale Hall and the first thing he did was to ban 'outsiders' eating in his Hall...how easy it is to ban facilities...like that something in the manger!

After some trials and tribulations to feed and sustain myself on my own cooking, I quit my Qrs and joined the rather expensive Faculty Hostel which was walking distance from my work-place. So, I sold my heavy-handed bike to the cycle-shop boy Gopi (who is now a mature cycle-doctor) for a song, to pay my hefty mess bills.

A few years later, my friend Tyagi was leaving KGP to join Telco as a High Officer and didn't know what to do with his grand-father's bike which was a Phillips with no frills. And he gifted it to me and left KGP with an easy heart for several reasons, apart from great love for (bikeless) me:

1. No one would buy it...

2. No one would steal it...

3. He couldn't take it to Telco...he would be reverted to KGP if his higher-ups saw him riding it...

4. He couldn't abandon it like Kunti did Karna for fear of his granpa's soul...

So, I was using it happily and showing it to Tyagi when he was visiting his alma mater, IIT KGP, a few times till he got married and settled down at Telco and lost all interest in KGP and his Vintage Phillips bike.

After I was convinced that Tyagi wouldn't visit KGP anymore, I sold it to Gopi for a song again...I wanted the money as Sean Connery said in The Great Train Robbery:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYuWpiu6QVM

...for my Vazir Filter cigarettes bought from the wholesale market in Gole Bazaar.

...Posted by Ishani

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Collapse Syndrome - Repeat Telecast

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http://ramarollingshutters.com/images/cg33.jpg

...But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses....

 

...Jerome K. Jerome

I hate locks...

I don't say they don't have their uses...but as Jerome K Jerome said, everything has its drawbacks. Just because something has its uses it doesn't mean that I have to love it.

The first pushbike I bought was with my second pay-check at IIT KGP in 1965. I traveled to the Gole Bazaar in a rickshaw and got down at the street-corner cycle shop of Motilal Vohra Bros. Vohra Saheb was condescending and didn't even offer me a seat...it was a sellers' market then. And he took 2 hours for assembling my Avon Green bicycle. The only frill was her Green Color. She cost me Rs 220 which was more than half my take-home then. And he gave me the key of her rim-lock and asked me to buzz off...which I did and reached  Gokhale Hall in half an hour flat. It was dinner time and I was hungry. So, I parked her in the verandah beside a few other decrepit bikes and felt awfully proud. And entered the Mess after duly locking her rim-lock. By the time I returned after dinner, she was gone with the wind...I cried.

When I bought my Maruti 800 car 35 years later it was a dream come true. She came with two keys. But with a trick door-lock. I hung up one of the two keys on the peg at home and one day made bold to drive her to the Gole Bazaar where there was no parking zone. As I tried parking her under a tree to and fro and left and right, I got nervous and switched off the ignition and came out and shut the door plumb. And was locked out. I had to ring up my son at our Qrs and beg him to bring the duplicate key on his scooter.

And one noon, after parking my Maruti triumphantly in the Institute and emerging victoriously, I was met by a gentleman apparently waiting for the driver of a Maruti looking similar to his brand new one which was parked under the mango tree. He smiled at me and asked me for the key of my Maruti:

"What for?"

"O, I am locked out with the key of my Maruti inside...I would like to try and open it with yours"

"Sorry, that won't work...it will damage both your lock and my key...I can drive you to your Qrs and you can fetch your duplicate key"

"My duplicate is with the Indian Bank...which gave me the loan."

"Chalieye...I will drive you to the Indian Bank and fetch their man with your duplicate key"

Do you think that gent would love his locks any day?

In 1965, when I joined IIT KGP, it was like the dream-come-true of our Vishwa Kavi who sang:

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high..."

There were no collapsible gates in the Main Building where our Physics Department is housed. 

On a rainy lunchtime in 1970 I was sitting in my Office on the first floor waiting for the rain to halt. It was quiet and the corridors were deserted because of the rain. Suddenly there was an explosion in the verandah in front of the Director's Office, as if a Diwali atom-bomb had gone off. Along with a few others I too went over for a look-see and by then the miscreant had run away. There was no crater nor a mushroom cloud but just a few pockmarks on the ground and some vestigial smoke.

That was enough...those were the days of nascent Naxalite violence in the Calcutta Colleges, and the 'bomb' near our Diro's Office was enough to set the Naxal cat among the KGP pigeons.

Within a few days, a series of collapsible gates made of the toughest steel were installed in either entry of each and every corridor. They were supposed to roll in and roll out frictionless over wheels on a frame on the ground. 

Ha! 

Within a few months, dirt and sand and grime got deposited in the grooves on the floor. With the result that when they collapse after a Herculean effort, they wouldn't relapse....and sometimes they would prolapse...

But the strength of any gate is less than or equal to the strength of its lock, which was usually the smallish Link lock since bigger locks wouldn't go into the semi-openable latches with tiny keyholes. 

But a huge establishment came into being from nowhere consisting of several security men deployed to lock them in the evening and open them in the morning with two sets of keys, one with them and the other hanging on a board at the Main Security Gate.

A typical instance of Parkinson's law at work.

Couple of times I was locked in and had to scream and gesture like a wild monkey to catch the attention of a passerby. Because, the security man in charge of locking our collapsible gates had a tiff with his wife and was too distracted to check if any inmate is trapped inside before locking him in.

Once, in 1985, two good decades after my stay there, one Sunday noon, I got this terrific urge to read Weinberg's book at home and discovered that the tome was in my Office. And when I went there, I found I couldn't enter it because the collapsible gates were closed and locked. I returned to the Main Gate and found that a new chap was manning the key-board. I asked him for the key of the Gate Phy-2. 

And he asked me:

"Where is your letter?"

"What letter?"

"The letter from your HoD permitting that you can be issued the key"

"Is it a new rule?"

"Yes, since this morning"

"But I am a Professor here for all of 3 decades"

"Sorry, no letter --- no key"

Fortunately the HoDs by then had phones in their Qrs and so I asked him to connect me to our HoD. Which he did grudgingly. And Professor BKS was kind enough to instruct the young chap to issue me the key for the nonce.

I could see Bernard Levin's Theorem at work here:

 http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/07/bernard-levins-theorem.html 

In 1995, Professor P from IIT Delhi, a close friend and ex-colleague of our Director KLC, was on a ten-day visit to IIT KGP as an External Expert for our Physics JEE. And seeing our collapsible gates, he wondered aloud:

"You guys seem to be living in jungle-raj. I will talk to KLC and get him remove all your collapsible gates and dump them in the Bay of Bengal"

Apparently he didn't succeed...they were very much kicking and thriving when I went there a couple of years ago...they must have become a vested interest to the Establishment...like those Pearly Gates.



...Posted by Ishani

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Pushbike Mystery - Repeat Telecast

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Sunday, February 22, 2009

Every dog his Day!

It's raining dogs here today!

Pet dog, Lap dog
Bull dog, Watch dog
Hot dog
Top dog
Better rear a Slumdog!

Posted by G P Sastry (gps1943@yahoo.com) at 8:45 PM 



Quite a few dogs squeezed in there!

But in 1967, our best UG Teacher in EE at IIT KGP, Prof BRR, told me one day:

"Your cycle has a dog, you know!"

That had me frisking my Webster...and how MANY dogs were there under that single item: "dog"! 

God!

After my catastrophic fall from my tricycle at 4, I stood in awe of all such pedaled vehicles.

In 1953, our seaside Village, Muthukur, had no bicycles. The entire village was an oval with the main road as the major axis less than a mile long. The highlights of the Village were the High School, Police Station, Dispensary, and the Post Office. And all were walking distance from one another. Most of the students of our School were from nearby hamlets and they walked in droves happily singing songs and gossiping and frolicking.

In 1955, when I was in Class IX, a young teacher, Harihara Sarma, joined the School fresh from his College...smart and friendly. My Father, the HM, was kind to him (these brahmins stick together) and permitted him to stay in his Village, Eepur, 5 miles away and commute (which was against the prevailing rules). So, he bought a brand new Raleigh Cycle with a bicycle-pump fitted to it; and he used to ride it to our school everyday dressed in impeccable white shirt and pants. He soon became our hero.

With wide-eyed admiration I used to watch him cycle down the main-road tingling his bell. Two things struck me as strange that never happened with my tricycle. 

First, he would pedal furiously for a while and then stop pedaling...but the bike wouldn't stop...it went on and on and on till the end of the road as if it were an eagle in the sky that glided without flapping his wings.

Second, he would often reverse-pedal while the bike is on the run. It would make a naughty whirring sound but never back-track...so unlike my tricycle...that was due to the dog inside it that BRR talked about much later.

Both these features mystified me no end.

When I got promoted to Class XI, which was my school-leaving year, I used to beg Harihar-sir whenever he used to visit our home, to lug up his cycle on its stand and let me sit on the floor and pedal it furiously with my hands and also reverse-hand-pedal to my heart's content. And he used to oblige because I was but a child of 13 and just about 4 feet tall.

Much later, at IIT KGP, BRR asked me to watch another curious thing about our running cycle-wheels...the optical pattern generated by the spokes. And as I did so he asked:

"You teach EM, no? What does the pattern look like?"  

And I got him there:


"Dipole field?"

BRR was great...as I said the other day, he was the one who asked me to run to Thackers and buy the only copy left of Jerome K Jerome's 'Three Men in a Boat'. As it happens, that half-century-old book is still with me, and I must have read it a handful of times, and consult it often for my blogs...all the books I mention are available full-text online, but, as I said the other day, nothing beats a book since each has its own nostalgic aroma around it.

Coming to that dipole-pattern of the running cycle wheel, it took me a long while to realize that it is a Dynamic Moire' Pattern.

Talking of Moire' Patterns, I recall one more fascinating thing that I daily used to watch while walking on the Road in front of Gate # 5 at IIT KGP from the Gate to the end of the road. After crossing the Tata Steel Stadium, there are about half a dozen Y-shaped 3-storied B Type Qrs. Their front balconies had walls with tiles removed in a regular array to allow for breeze to stream through. Two of these striated walls were at an acute angle. 

On my evening walks, when the balconies were well-lit by bulbs, as I proceeded, the holes in the walls used to dance in and out of step rapidly and generate a Dynamic Moire' Pattern of regular huge ghost-holes passing in succession. That was a truly great spectacle!

People over the decades tried fiddling with the basic design of the pushbike, like changing the wheel diameter ratio, the sizes of the sprockets that are connected by the chain giving various 'amplification factors', and the shape of the frame...but in vain. The pushbike resisted all such tinkering and stayed the same almost like that figure of Eve designed by God.

Hats off to the anonymous inventor of this blessed machine!


...Posted by Ishani

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Swadeshi Cycles - Repeat Telecast

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http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/echoes-of-gandhi-in-electricity-generating-spinning-wheel-a-micro-power-plant-for-the-poor.html

...India is not an important country, but perhaps the most important country for the future of the world...All convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular, Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East which is not active in some Indian mind...

...E. P. Thompson

Cho Chweet!!!

Let us pat ourselves on our backs for getting such a glorious certificate from a British Marxist Sahib whose neo-capitalists, who employed their own preteens to sweep the chimneys of their sooty factories with devastating consequences to them (the kids) including scrotal cancer, have for more than two centuries mercilessly sucked the blood of this same India and let off only when they could longer latch on to it...like a leech that was sprinkled with salt by that 'half-naked fakir'...long sentence that...like 'marriage'...

Ok, I am ranting...

I can recall only 4 machines and instruments that I have seen in my Village 70 years ago that haven't changed in their materials or technology till today:

1. Bicycle

2. Sewing Machine

3. Clinical Thermometer

4. Stethoscope

But none of these was allowed to be manufactured in India when I was born in 1943. They were all 'Made in England' and exported to British India using materials that were stolen and exported from British India for the sole benefit of the British money-bags and, incidentally, their workers. That is how British Colonialism worked wherever they went...and they boasted that the "Sun never sets on the British Empire" meaning that there was always a piece of inhabited land around the globe where the Union Jack flew and it is daytime. Someone retorted that this was because God didn't trust the British in the dark. Their 'double-exporting trick' is insidious and they were the first in the history to invent it. It was like Ishani's Sharing:

 http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/04/share-shore-shorn.html

Give it to that fakir who finds mention in the blessed quote above...you may hate him as much as you do your neighbor, but he was the first to understand the nature of colonial roguery and devise a non-violent way to beat it...

"Boycott all goods imported by the British to fill their own pockets"

...and my grandpa bought a charkha after his retirement.

The tables have now turned with the opening up of this country's wretched economy.

Let me explain:

1. The word 'resource': When we were young it meant something like coal or iron or at best wits. When I was a teen I heard of our 'Ministry of Education' (I got a scholarship from them). After Lal Bahdur Shastri died in harness and that Building at New Delhi got to be called 'Shastri Bhavan', it came to be known as 'Ministry of Education & Youth Welfare'. Towards the end of my stay at IIT KGP it came to be called 'Ministry of Human Resource Development'...MHRD...like MSMA (Member, Society of Mutual Admiration).

Hmm! 'Human Resources'? They mean you & me, Boss!

I hear nowadays, in the IT Industry, 'resources' don't refer to their laptops and work-stations and gizmos but their 'software developers'...'s' and 'd' in the lower case befitting their anonymous labels. 

And India leads in that resource...Edwin Taylor of MIT in his 70s called them our software-plantation workers...cotton-pickers...

Yet the West gets jittery whenever they hear the word 'Bangalore' or even 'Hyderabad'. And lose their sleep...from Obamajee to the Dotbuster and his progeny.


2. The common man's (imported) Raleigh bicycle was selling at Rs 250 then...that was my HM Father's Monthly Pay.  

After the Brits left and our economy got liberated, Hero Cycles manufactured in Ludhiana became the world's largest selling bicycle...I quote wiki...

When I last bought my bare Hero Jet in 2000, it cost me Rs 500 and my pay then was about Rs 40,000, give or take a thousand. That means while my Father had to spend his entire monthly income to buy just one bicycle, I could have bought, say, 80 of them. 

And both my Father and I have always been utterly-butterly middle-class.

See why I rant against British Colonialism although I love English and Englishmen and taught and thought in English...some shameless hypocrisy there!!!




...Posted by Ishani

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