Memory Recall...

Memory Recall!!

Memory in our minds doesn’t get erased at all! Just the other day I received a phone call and the moment I heard the person’s voice, my memory was able to dig the sound bite from the deeply embedded journals in my mind down, safely stored for 37 years duration and in a jiffy bring a smile on my face as I recollected and recalled the name behind this voice! It was simply amazing!

My father, graduated as a Civil Engineer – the first batch from NIE, Mysore. He started his career in the city of Mumbai, Bombay then…in a petroleum company. While I don’t recollect the name of the company, it could have been ‘Shell’ – Burmah Shell, what is now known as Bharath Petroleum Corporation Ltd. He wasn’t there for long though. Moved on to PWD in New Delhi and when Hindustan Steelworks Ltd., what is now known as SAIL (Steel Authority of India Ltd.) was formed, he opted to join them at Durgapur in 1959. Through their old boys network, a few of the batchmates remained in touch and I haven’t the faintest idea how the network worked those days!

When I got an opportunity to join Batliboi Ltd in Mumbai in April 1982, my father knew that I would struggle finding a place to live and suggested that I meet his good old friend from NIE Mysore, Mr. Govindarajan. All that my father had told me about his friend was that he worked in the Railways and I should talk to another of his batchmates, Chairman and MD of Hindustan Dorr Oliver and get the address and telephone number from him. From being an absolute introvert and a dumb nitwit of a person in my childhood to a slightly better version post the college exposure in RECT (Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirapalli), I still was petrified at the thought of calling the chairman of a multinational, introduce myself and then ask him for a favour of giving me the address of his batchmate in Indian Railways. The very thought of engaging in a conversation with an unknown person would make me nervous and when worked up, I would end up talking very rapidly or begin to stammer. I could picture myself making a fool of myself on the telephone and hence, did the next best thing. I kept postponing to call him, hoping that I would never have to struggle to get some place to live in Mumbai and there would be no need to establish a contact with Mr. Govindarajan.

That was more easier said than done. It came to a stage when I was given a very short notice to evict myself from a 1 BHK home in a Chawali in Matunga. Another dimension was now added to my woes; desperation along with nervousness. I was dead sure that I would never be able to say anything straight on the phone. I decided to meet him personally and that was a good thing, in fact. Like a chess game, I thought of all the possible combinations of my conversation with Mr. Krishna Rao…he said, I said…so on and so forth! To cut the long story short, he didn’t have the time to indulge in any small talk and having satisfied himself on my identity, he just gave me a chit of paper with Mr. Govindarajan’s address and telephone number.

Armed with this information as I came back to my temporary shelter in the Matunga Chawali, I realized that Mr Govindarajan wasn’t very far from where I lived. Indian Railways have a huge housing complex in Matunga near the Infinity Bridge. This is a foot over bridge connecting Matunga Road station in Western Railway with Matunga Station in Central Railway. It is a fairly long walk when somebody wants to cross over from Central Railway line to the Western Line and if one is in a hurry, the bridge appears to be infinitely long. Hence the name, I guess: Infinity Bridge.

My father was a stickler for discipline and I presumed all his batchmates would be no different. So, I called Mr. Govindarajan (Uncle) at his home number to introduce myself and seek a time to meet him at his home. He was extremely warm and welcomed me as though he had known me for a very long time. I guess the affection was mostly because of the regard he had for my father. It was a Sunday and he insisted that I have lunch with him and family. It was a real and welcome change from the hotel food that I was having in Mumbai in the Udupi restaurants. All the South Indian dishes are tweaked to suit the  bland taste of the local Mumbai population with faint traces of the spices from down South.

After a sumptuous, satisfying and gratifying meal, Uncle asked me if he could be of any help. Here was a chance for me to open up to him and tell him about my journey in Mumbai thus far and the urgency in locating a place to park myself in a house. I told him that I was tired of being shunted around by my Company and then this Chawali, which was a community accommodation. He thought for a while and then suggested that I visit him the following Sunday as well. He had called another person for lunch – this person was son of another of my father’s batchmate from NIE. He too was in the Indian Railways. His son was a graduate from NIE, Mysore and just 1 year my senior.

Uncle stopped short there and said, come next Sunday and we will try and work out something. It was nice talking to him and while he extracted every possible detail about my college days and now about Batliboi Ltd. I was also able to find some courage and ask him about his job in the Railways. He happened to be in a Special Projects Division with a very specific task that was time bound.

Briefly, it goes like this: British Steels had supplied a very large quantity of steel to Indian Railways – Bombay Division, which was used for making girders. These girders are used extensively by the Railways to construct bridges. One can imagine in a city like Mumbai with railway lines criss-crossing the entire city, how much steel girders were used during the construction phase. British Steels had sent Indian Railways a terse letter stating that one batch of the steel that was supplied, may undergo a fatigue failure. They further added that Indian Railways must take abundant precaution to identify this lot and replace such of those girders with new ones and failing to identity and replace might result in a catastrophe.

All the while I was listening to my uncle with my mouth wide open, unable to believe what he was saying and also wondering how on earth could anybody find out which girder had been made with this batch of steel from British Steels?

I was reminded of a novel my father had recommended that I read; “No Highway” by British author Nevil Shute. My father was a great fan of Nevil Shute since most of the principle character in his novels were Engineers and the stories were around their engineering skills. “No Highway” was about an eccentric scientist who had been claiming that certain parts of a plane would develop metal fatigue sooner than officially estimated, but nobody took him seriously. While flying to the site of an air crash that killed a Soviet ambassador, he discovers that his own plane had already flown twice its permitted number of hours and he used his technical knowledge to sabotage it as soon as it landed. This is just a teaser so that it will encourage you to buy this book and read!

All my thoughts, after listening to my Uncle was which bridge would fail, each time I used the vast suburban network to go about my job. My fears were totally unfounded as Indian Railways had meticulously maintained a ledger to trace each and every batch of steel that was brought inwards into stock and later where they were dispatched as raw material to be converted to finished product: namely bridge girders. While the process was laborious my Uncle and his team of Engineers were successful in replacing the entire batch that was believed to undergo fatigue failure well within the specified time limit.

The following Sunday I promptly presented myself at their house again and this is where I first met Hari (Harinarayana Venkat Rao). The year 1982…Hari was working in Bharath Petroleum in their refinery unit at Mahul and had just moved to a 1 BHK flat in Chembur, a suburban colony on the Harbor line. Lucky for us, we hit it off on the first visit itself and he offered to accommodate me in his home in Chembur. The location of this flat was great for Hari as Chembur is not very far from his Refinery Unit at Mahul, but for me it was a 40 minutes train ride from Chembur to Bombay VT (Victoria Terminus), now renamed as Mumbai Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus. From Bombay VT it was a 20 minute brisk walk to Fort area where Batliboi office was situated.

Two things that I remember distinctly…one, I used to wake up first and prepare filter coffee, but the second is more important of the two. The art of packing the upper deck with coffee powder in the drip filter was something that I learnt from Hari. For best result, he insisted that I spread two spoons of powder in the upper deck, place the plunger and then spread another two spoons of coffee powder above the plunger. While a bit skeptical at first, the excellent quality of decoction convinced me that this was the correct way and to this day, I have been using this method…thanks to Hari, or his mother perhaps for the guidance that she would have originally provided!

Not sure how long I continued in this Chembur home, but I found an alternative once again in Matunga near Mysore Association Building where I shared a two bedroom flat with three others. This was again a temporary home since I had found an alternative job in Calcutta, nearer to my fathers home in Durgapur. I left Mumbai sometime in 1983 and both Hari and I drifted apart, never to meet or talk again.

So, just the other day when I received a call from an unknown number and answered cautiously…the voice was a familiar one, none other than Harinarayana – in a fraction of a second the mind amazingly traced it out! 37 years isn’t a short while by any stretch of imagination, but here we were talking as if we had just parted yesterday!

We have a lot of catching up to do…from our bachelor days to the present post retirement days. Come to think about it…the lockdown isn’t bad at all…I seem to be catching up with many long lost friends and ex-colleagues!!

Cheers to that!!

     

Lockdown!

I’ve stopped reading the Newspaper ever since they started spewing negativity in all that the present government did or has been doing. But, not wanting to be left behind I developed this habit of watching a 50 minute capsule between Monday and Friday by Rajat Sharma of “Aap Ki Adalat” fame. I liked his unbiased reporting style in his news capsule titled “Aaj Ki Baat”.

On 21^st March when PM Modi announced at 9 PM that the nation would go under a ‘Total Peoples Curfew’ on 22^nd March 2020 (Sunday) and made an emotional appeal to all Indians that ‘Social Distancing’ was the only way forward if we as a nation intended to defeat the growing menace of Corona virus, named ‘Covid-19’, I thought that there would be very few takers! By nature, Indians are an undisciplined lot, and breaking the law is considered an act of bravado. Hence, we were all pretty surprised when the mammoth population of 1.3 Billion stayed at home. While there were stray cases of violation of the appeal, by and large people honored the request and I think it was for two simple reasons: One, it was out of respect for the person making that appeal and Two, people were scared of the consequences if the enemy made its entry within them. With all the known medicines failing to kill Covid-19 on its tracks, people may have been unnerved by this silent and violent killer virus. After all, what would the PM of a nation gain by asking its population to voluntarily lock themselves at home? Majority of the wage-earning age group within our country are in the category ‘short term employment’, who get paid either daily or weekly. Most of them are a migrant lot, stay in temporary shelters and their daily food purchases come from their daily or weekly wages. So, a one day shutdown would mean a hefty loss for the daily bread earners.

Smartly, PM Modi had declared this self-imposed curfew on a Sunday which is a weekly off for the entire country except for our women homemakers. The economic impact from this was absolutely minimal.

But little did we know that PM Modi had a larger plan in his mind. We came to know about his plans much later, though. He had completely relied on his team of doctors and advisors from ICMR – Indian Council of Medical Research for the action plan on our nations war with Covid-19.

Believed to have started from the city of Wuhan in China in their infamous wet market, this virus spreads only from human to humans. A simple sneeze or sputum from a cough from an infected patient can be ingested by another or several humans in close proximity, within a radius of 3 feet. As the virus makes its way through the nose to the throat region, its hair like follicles smartly embeds itself and begins to draw nutrients from its host. As they rapidly grow and multiply, symptoms of a viral flue make an appearance, namely fever and dry irritating cough. Not having encountered this invading monster before, the mighty human body finds itself helpless and down on its knees. The millions of years of memory of our human cells come to a naught since it is unable to quickly create an antibody to fight this new invader which has built for itself a new weapon. So long it remains in the throat region, it is believed that steam inhalation and intake of hot fluids flushes these virus into the stomach, where the strong stomach acids do not give the virus a chance to survive. But if it were to live and multiply unchecked, it can find a passage into the lungs and this is where it literally and figuratively drowns the person to death by snatching his or her breath away.

ICMR was quick to impress upon the PM that social distancing was the right and the only way to fight this virus which by end March 2020 was on a rampage. On hindsight, the Chinese Govt. made two mistakes. They did not reveal the deadly form of this virus when it made its ugly visibility in November/December 2019. Second, they allowed people to travel all over the world from Wuhan. Statistically one person can eventually spread to 406 unsuspecting people in a finite short period of time.

Kerala state in India was the first to be affected. One university in Kerala has a tie-up with University at Wuhan and sends large to very large contingent of Indian students to Wuhan for higher studies every year. Cochin airport became the gateway to the entry of Corona virus into South India. But within a short period, most major international airports in India provided an entry to this virus, since the spread had become worldwide by then.

India can be a potential breeding ground if this pandemic flu were to make an entry. With a population 5 times that of US stacked in one-third the geographic area of US, the crowded cities and infrastructure namely trains, buses, airports, busy market places and places of worship could be a nightmare for the medical and administrative fraternity. However, the 22^nd March 2020 people’s voluntary curfew gave hopes to our scientific community and the PMO that this may finally work out, if the administration plugged all the loopholes and forcefully impose social distancing through a lockdown. Since there is no perfect way of executing a lockdown, the best approach was to introduce it and have quick thinking people in the administrative set-up to institute remedial measures as and when gaps surfaced. Closing the loopholes as and when visible was a very prudent and practical way of executing this mammoth task of a lockdown.

ICMR had also categorically told the PMO that ‘sooner the better’ and PM was quick to bring this on from 24^th March 2020 itself. Many within the country predicted doomsday for the country’s economy, but what good is economic wealth if people are dead?

“People come first” – if this can be the mantra for a successful organization, why can’t this be extended to a country? And, this is precisely what PM Modi said “Jaan hai to Jahan hai” which he later tweeked it to “Jaan hai aur Jahan bhi hai”!

Lockdown means differently to each one of us and the feelings just cannot be generalized.  It is very personal and private! Can one prepare for this isolation? I don’t think so…but, my experience with retired life effective from 1^st January 2019 came in  handy, I would think. The first five months of 2019 were totally devoted to my mother as a care giver…she was diagnosed with cancer of the colon in stage IV in December 2018. Each day was hectic with issues that we hadn’t encountered before. In hindsight, we are thankful that this pandemic problem did not occur in 2019…the constant and daily flow of nurses, doctors, relatives and friends not only kept us busy, but helped in cheering up the gloomy minds. The very thought of having to manage a terminally ill patient at home during a lockdown sends shivers up my spine! My thoughts and prayers go out to all those people who have ailing parents at home and those who need full time care and support. These are very difficult times.

Initially, the word ‘Lockdown’ would cause a panic attack – back of the mind there was always a fear that groceries and provisions would become scarce since people resort to panic purchases. Watching neighbors purchase much more than what is normally necessary triggers a desire to buy and not be left behind. While the shopkeepers kept reiterating that everything would be available as usual, social media and local news channels would intentionally create a doubt in the mind. Once a couple of days passed and supply appeared to be normal, the mind eased a bit and we started concentrating on how to use the available time. Quite a few activities crossed my mind, but one of them stood out. Having indulged in cutting and sewing, it was my desire for a long time to stitch a kurta for myself. A gents kurta is a tricky one and not as simple as a womens kurti. One needs to study the finer nuances in measurement and cutting to get it right.

Thankfully, YouTube has a whole lot of videos on how to cut and stitch a gents kurta. I spent my initial time watching the various videos and narrow it down to two of them. I used the method demonstrated in these two videos to use an old 2 meter cloth piece to measure and cut. I wasn’t careful with my first test piece and ended up short on the cloth. I didn’t have enough cloth to stitch the two side pouch pockets. In my second attempt however with another 2 meter cut length, I was able to cut the cloth according to availability and had sufficient material to stitch the two side pouch pockets. Both of them came out pretty well. The first one I kept for myself and the second one was gifted. I was able to keep myself busy for almost two full weeks learning, measuring, cutting and stitching. A time well spent. Now, I feel I can stitch for any person willing to take a chance with me!

Although we were aware that there was a possibility of the lockdown getting extended, we weren’t sure for how long and what would be the long term consequences of this. I have been wondering what would be the new normal post 30^th April 2020!

Would it mean that most IT and ITES businesses would work from home for a longer duration, maybe another 2 to 3 months? Manufacturing, Infrastructure development (including the construction industry) and Agriculture would necessarily have to restart, perhaps cautiously in the beginning and in staggered phases . Education field will probably see a major transformation from classroom lectures to online virtual classroom. We observe that many institutions have already made this change and students are beginning to like it. It takes away the painful travel time in the crowded roads – the dust and grime can be given a permanent good bye! With majority of them cellphone and social media savvy who make the best use of technology, this is a great relief.

The travel, tourism and hospitality sector may take a heavy toll – there is a likelihood of marked decrease in travel and tourism. Another aspect in our lives that will take a huge beating is the pleasure of a face-to-face meeting and chatting. Covid-19 has snatched this one thing that is dear to all human beings.

Malls and the mall culture may totally vanish from our lives. Jai ho to Kirana stores in India. They certainly have survived and through them we have survived in this lockdown period.

It remains to be seen whether the advice of our doctors worldwide on ‘Social Distancing’ will make us win this waiting game between humanity and the Covid-19. Till such time the scientific, diagnostic and research folks come out with a solution by way of pills and a vaccination in the long term, we shall remain at the mercy of this unseen and invisible enemy. It just takes a tiny virus and its single minded focus to bring the entire humanity to its knees! That’s the power of “Nature” for us Humans…

We thought that we were invincible, till this tiny creature arrived on the scene and said “Ab hum agaye hain, tumlog ab side ho jao”!!