From-here-there-everywhere

My Encounter with a Rotary Dial Telephone (Late 1950s) You know, having a telephone at home in the late fifties was a big deal. Only senior officers, police officials,doctors, journalists or the really well-off families had one. And those early phones weren’t like the ones with dials. Most were manual . You picked up the receiver, and a polite operator would come on the line and ask, “Number, please?” Then you’d tell him/her who you wanted to speak to, and he/she would connect you. Naturally, I had no idea what a rotary dial phone looked like, let alone how to use one. I’d only heard they existed in places like Mumbai and Delhi . ( Madras and Calcutta probably caught up a bit later.) Then, sometime around 1959, my family was traveling from Bareilly to Bangalore . My cousin came along too. We stopped for a couple of days in Bombay —yes, it was still Bombay then—to stay with my mother’s uncle. He worked in the Telephone Department . And that’s where the magic happened. There, in ...

During my service with BHEL in Bhopal and Bangalore, I underwent basic courses in German language which was required for deputation to Germany in 1980-81 for joint working with Siemens .  About six months back , after a gap of about 45 years, I felt like brushing up my knowledge of German so joined online course Duolingo. This reminded me of an interesting incident which took place while I was in Germany ( at Erlangen, Bavaria).   Members of our engineering team from Bangalore, who were posted, were fairly well versed in German language to manage day to day affairs. A few of engineers from Bangalore Office, who used to visit on official work for a short term (week or two) , used to be accommodated in a nearby hotel.They were knowing only engineering related German and so not well versed in conversational German.Therefore, they were advised to remember the name of the hotel and name of the street so that while returning from the office they could reach their hotel without any ...

  My tryst with Trigeminal-neuralgia (whatever it means) Time : somewhere in 80's  Place : Malleswaram, Bangalore I had to visit a dentist in Malleswaram. Apparently one of the molars needed a filling. After it was done I went back home, maybe after one or two days, I felt sharp pain on that side of my face where the dental filling was done. I went back to the dentist. He checked the filling job done by him and declared that it was in order.   As to the pain, he declared that it was Trigeminal-neuralgia and suggested that I visit a neurologist immediately. He also suggested that I might need Alcohol injection into my jaw which frankly terrified me. We took an auto and proceeded to consult him. I told him about the dentist's diagnosis.  He advised a brain scan and then declared that my brain was in order. But the pain was still persisting. The neurologist advised me to go to the dentist again to check my filling again. ( probably he wanted to curse the dentist b...

   ( Above picture is of Flower Fields,San Diego, clicked when we visited it in 2018) Reminiscences of Holi:  I had been planning to write about my Holi experiences since long but kept putting it off. This time I made up my mind to write about it. It was the late fifties when I was in my middle school. Place : Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh We were residing in a Railway colony which was a small world in itself. Our activities for the HOLI used to start with organising for Holika Dahan  ( Holika,  the sister of the demon king Hiranyakashipu  , was killed in the fire) .   There was an open place in our colony earmarked for it. A couple of days before Poornima ( Day of Holika Dahan), a Pooja was conducted at the site and initial collection of fuel ( Wood, cow dung cakes and other combustible materials) were collected and placed there. Then the task of gathering more fuel was taken over by the Bachcha Party (we) under the guidance of a few elders. We used t...

The year was 1967! I was studying in the 4th Year of Engineering ( It used to be a 5 year integrated course at that time) at Jodhpur. It was a requirement of the course that we were to spend our summer vacation time as a trainee  in any reputed engineering firm. I applied to ITI Bangalore as I had my uncle's place to stay. Duration of the training was about three months. At the ITI factory , during the lunch period of 30 minutes, instrumental version of popular film songs  were played on their PA system in the canteen as well as in the work spots. These tunes used to be  from Tamil, Kannada and many other languages.  I used to find one of the tunes quite catchy and appealing which I still remember. It was from a Tamil Movie , that much I knew. It had a notable feature that in the midway there was a change of pitch, which was a bit unusual in the Indian context.  About a fortnight back I remembered that tune again and got an urge to identify and listen to it. But...

                                              ( Pencil sketch by Anil Jagalur )  Those were the days in Sept 1965 when we were at Jodhpur....... Indo Pak war was in full swing. Jodhpur, being near to the western border and also being an Air Force base was a target for many air raids. We used to hear, while sitting in trenches dug out by us in front of our house, sounds of Anti Aircraft Guns and also number of bombs, which used to be dropped in Jodhpur (in total 192 bombs were dropped during the seventeen days' war). My father Dr D Ranga Rao, whom we siblings used to address  as Bapa, was a medical officer posted in Railway Hospital at Jodhpur in Mid 60's.We stayed in a railway quarter, which was just diagonally opposite the hospital.His posting was in outpatient and later in Mobile Dispensary ( A full bogie -hospital-on-wheels) which used to get attache...