Ramana's Musings

Here is a story that has been authenticated from impeccable sources. I thank my friend Anil for sending me this very inspiring piece of our history.

After getting freedom, a meeting was organized to select the first General of the Indian Army. Jawahar Lal Nehru was heading that meeting. Leaders and Army officers were discussing to whom this responsibility should be given.

 In between the discussion Nehru said, “I think we should appoint a British officer as a General of Indian Army as we don’t have enough experience to lead the same.”

 Everybody supported Nehru because if the PM was suggesting something, how could they not agree?

But one of the army officers abruptly said, “I have a point, sir.”

 Nehru said, “Yes, gentleman. You are free to speak.”

 He said ,”You see, sir, we don’t have enough experience to lead a nation too, so shouldn’t we appoint a British person as first PM of India?”

The meeting hall  suddenly  went  quiet.

Then, Nehru said, “Are you ready to be the first General of the Indian Army ?” 

 He got a golden chance to accept  the  offer  but he refused  the same  and said, “Sir, we have a very talented army officer, my senior, Lt. Gen. Cariappa, who is the most deserving among us.”

The army officer who raised his voice against the PM was Lt. General Nathu Singh Rathore, the 1st  Lt. General of the Indian Army.

Since the ibid mail was circulated, numerous veterans have pointed out to me that it was NOT Gen Nathu BUT Gen Rajendra Sinhji, who turned down the offer to be the first chief, ahead of Gen Cariappa. Well, it now turns out that it was BOTH.

What a tradition that the Indian armed forces can be genuinely proud of!

Tags: Gen. Cariappa, Indian Armed forces, Jawaharlal Nehru

This is a follow up post on my yesterday’s post on my Nostalgia Trip To Tirupur.

This photograph shows a very common sight in Tirupur. It is a courier carrying about a ton of cotton cloth between two processing locations. Possibly from a calendaring unit to a cut make and trim unit. The vehicle is a 50CC moped rightly called the work horse in South India, manufactured by one of India’s native grown companies called the TVS group.
The picture has been put in here to show the innovative spirit of the local populace. That a tiny machine like this can be used to carry such a heavy load surprises many first time visitors to the town. The locals do not even seem to notice it.

The unloaded vehicle looks like this.

My son Ranjan’s first owned vehicle was a TVS moped somewhat like the one in the picture. Subsequently, he graduated to two more higher powered models of motorcycles from the same stable.
Oddly enough, the very versatile and sturdy vehicle is not popular outside Tamil Nadu.

Tags: Moped, Tirupur, TVS, Work horse

There are two towns that have developed a particular connection with me which keeps taking me back to them repeatedly. Bangalore, now known as Bengaluru and Tirupur. Last week, I had to visit both the places as I had to attend to some business as well as some crisis management in a close friend’s family matter.

Since reservations on convenient trains were difficult to come by, I flew to Bengaluru, spent a night there while attending to some business during the day and took an afternoon train for a six hour journey to Tirupur the next day. I took a train again last Saturday afternoon from Tirupur and after a 26 hour journey, came back to Pune on Sunday evening. I had traveled 1800 Kms by train during this trip.

Tirupur is a name very well known in the specialized world of ready made garments, particularly in cotton knits. You can learn a lot about it here. My first visit to the place was in 1969 when it was little more than a slightly overgrown village. Subsequently, I had a lot more to do with the town between 1974 and 1977 with very frequent visits, during one of which, I had the first hand experience with our emergency excesses.

I then had nothing to do with Tirupur till 1987, but visited it a few times till early 1990. From 1990 till early 2002 however, Tirupur has been on my regularly visited towns for the very obvious reason that I had a lot of business dealings there and on two separate occasions, employed there.

Naturally, I have made many friends there and have very close relationships with some of them. I have known many rag to riches stories there as well riches to rags stories. Throughout my experience there though, I have had nothing but great affection and excellent hospitality from the locals. I have a soft corner to the town and its people.

My visit to Tirupur after over eight years was indeed a nostalgic one. I was not disappointed with the warmth and the hospitality of the people there and caught up with a number of my friends there and successfully managed the crisis at my friend’s home as well.

In the last eight years, Tirupur has changed a great deal. It is now a district head quarters for a separate district. Roads have been widened and new fly overs have been built as well as many old thoroughfares converted into one way roads. New construction everywhere made it difficult to recognize some old familiar areas.

Being heavily dependent on the export market to the USA and Europe, economic activity is subdued and there have been many closures of units. The units focused on the Indian market are thriving but it is sad to see many exporting units struggling.

My friends would like me to come back and make my residence there. Who knows? May be that will happen too, once again!

Tags: Bengaluru, Domestic Markets, Export, Tirupur, Train Journeys

My regular readers will recollect my fascination for the railways. As a traveling salesman before I got kicked upstairs and could fly, I have traveled throughout India by trains, and two of the trains that I used fairly regularly were the Frontier Mail from Bombay and back to Bombay from various places, or from Delhi to the Punjab and back; and the Grand Trunk Express. The very name Frontier Mail was enough to bring up many stories of the Frontier, now being called the trouble spots of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Here is what the Indian Railway Fan Club says about the Frontier Mail.
“Frontier Mail

The Frontier Mail was flagged off on Sep. 1, 1928, from Colaba Terminus, the main station on the BB&CI (later Western Railway). It was a replacement for the earlier Mumbai-Peshawar Mail. In winter (Sep. – Dec.), the Frontier Mail started from Ballard Pier (Mole Station) to connect with P&O steamships; this is the portion referred to as the “Duplicate” section of the Frontier Mail in old railway schedules and articles.

Leaving from Mole Station the train ran for a short while on tracks of the Bombay Port Railway and the GIPR via Bandra Jn. finally reaching its home tracks of the BB&CI Railway. For the rest of the year the train terminated at Colaba, but a separate train ran to Ballard Pier for the steamer connection. There were also times when the train ran this extra bit on some days of the week alternating with the normal route.

The train’s route took it through Baroda, Ratlam, Mathura, Delhi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, and finally to Peshawar. (The section beyond Delhi was run by the North Western Railway as train No. 3.) Peshawar was close to the frontier of British India in those days, hence the name of the train. It used to be the fastest long-distance train in the subcontinent.

Originally the BB&CI introduced it to rival the Punjab Limited of the GIPR, which also went from Bombay to Peshawar. The train had a reputation for being unusually punctual. Originally the rake had 5 coaches and a luxury dining car cum lounge car. As a prestige train of the BB&CI, the train offered plush conveniences on board, and the passengers had access to luxurious retiring rooms at stations along the way. It had air-cooled cars (using ice blocks) from about 1934.

After Independence, it went only up to Amritsar, via Delhi, from Bombay. The train has now [1996] been renamed “Golden Temple Mail”.

And this about the Grand Trunk Express:

“The Grand Trunk Express

This train, affectionately known as the ‘GT’ started running in 1929 just after the construction of the Kazipet-Balharshah section, which was the last link in the Delhi-Madras route. Initially it ran from Peshawar to Mangalore and took about 104 hours, one of the longest train routes. Later this service was changed to Lahore-Mettupalaiyam. In 1930 it reached its present status while running between Delhi and Madras.

As a prestigious train, it was one of the few to have the early methods of air cooling by ice blocks. It also carried a parcel van for urgent consignments. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the train used to run with a completely air-conditioned rake (First AC and AC Chair Car) on two days of the week, and with its usual rake on other days, and hence was sometimes known as the AC/GT Express. The train had a 21-coach rake in the 1980s, later extended to 22 and finally 24 coaches. Its first-class coaches were of the corridor type with extra large windows. The GT’s coaches (along with those of other premier trains in the 1970s) also had noticeably better suspension as well.”

Both these trains were part of the undivided India before partition between India and Pakistan, and many refugees in post partition India can tell stories about these two trains and what they did during the partition killings too.

The railways in both the countries were of vital importance for movement of goods and passengers and in India they continue to be even now. For instance, as this is being published, I am on my way to the South of India and two legs of my journey including an overnight one, totaling 32 hours will be by train.

Here is an image of a Pakistani train that was published some years ago showing passengers leaving Karachi to their various homes for Ramzan Id.

It therefore has come as a great disappointment to me when I read about the condition of the Pakistani Railways. If the contents of the article are true, Pakistan will be in greater trouble than it has been perceived to be, as it will seriously affect the movement of goods and passengers within Pakistan.

Tags: Frontier, Indian Railways, NWFA, Pakitan Railways, Trains

I had posted my blog yesterday on the Indian Postal system and this post will give a completely different perceptive to communications and how things have changed over the years.

Last Sunday, my father suddenly decided to try and establish contact with someone from his ancestral village. My grandfather and his siblings had left that village and my father and his siblings were all born elsewhere. There was however some tenuous connections with cousins etc which also had got broken over the many decades that the family spread out all over India.

First, I sent an email to our family members through a yahoo-group mail system asking for any information that any of the older members of the family may have and am still waiting for some response.

Next, I went to the internet and found that google has already got a map for the village and from there I navigated my way to various options and located one website that gave me a contact name and email address. The website belongs to a very enterprising young man who has opened a cottage industry at the village to provide some employment to local people as part of his commitment to rural development. He himself stays in a town and only visits the unit periodically. The unit manufactures hand made incense sticks.

I sent an email to the address given in the website and within an hour got a phone call from the young gentleman, with who I had a long conversation. I have decided that I shall keep in regular touch with him, as I found him to be the kind of young man that will bring about change in our rural parts.

This young man, while could not give me much information, as he was not from the village, was able to get another contact very active in the local affairs of the village and passed on the telephone number to me by an sms message. I was able to speak to that contact who turned out to be closer to my father’s age and the two of them had a long conversation giving complete satisfaction to my father. The two of them have decided to be in touch with each other too.

Phew!

Tags: Ancestral Village, Communications, Umayalpuram

My earliest recollection of anything to do with post is the longing for letters from my mother when I was eight years old. My parents and my siblings were then in Bombay and I had been left with my paternal uncle at Madras as an experiment to see if I would be compatible with my childless uncle and aunt for them to consider adopting me. This was quite a normal practice in India those days, and in some places, still prevails. That experiment failed but this post is not about that.

I went to school in the same school where my aunt was a teacher and generally had a very pleasant time during that one academic year that I was with them. My mother would religiously write post cards addressed to me and I was the only one in my class receiving mail from anywhere and was quite a hero for that.

By the end of that period, my family moved to Madras and my parents took me into their home, and the letters stopped.

Subsequently, whenever we went to our village for holidays, we would see postmen delivering mail to our relatives in the village. They were called runners and would cover many villages in a day by running between them with a cloth bag slung over their shoulders and a spear in their hand. For those interested, some details of these runners can be had from this fascinating site.

That spear totting postman was replaced by this man who was captured carrying mail from the railway station to the local post office some years ago.

Nowadays, that postman has been replaced by vans like this:

Now, city dwellers hardly use the Postal services, as Courier organizations have captured the imagination of the urban public. It is however a vital service for the majority of Indians who live in small towns and villages and depend on the post for their communications and more importantly for those all important money orders that are sent by members of the family working in far away cities or even overseas like the Middle East.

After the first introduction to the post via post cards from my mother, I got hooked to the post again, but more glamourously this time. My elder cousin was a librarian at the United States Information Service library in Madras, and got me involved in a Pen Pal programme. I exchanged many letters with three boys of my age from the USA, and over the years, as all of us grew up and found more interesting things to do, we stopped corresponding. A few years ago, with exposure to Google and Face Book, I tried to find them with no success.

That interlude also exposed me to the unique specimen, the stamp collector. Some of my friends were stamp collectors, and I was quite popular as I could give them American stamps! The only things that I collected were, punishments and injuries and scars from sports and games.

The next stage in my exposure to the post was growing up further and exchanging mushy love letters, about which I do not wish to elaborate here.

Then came my working life when the Indian Post took a very important role in my activities. As a traveling salesman, and living away from my family, I had to depend on letters and money orders and had an Identity Card issued by the Postal Department to enable me to collect letters and money orders addressed to me Care Of Post Master in many towns. I also had to write daily reports and mail them and had to use a combination of the Indian Postal Service and the Railway Mail Service. Writing and receiving love letters continued during this period as well and for some time into my married life when, immediately after marriage, I was sent on an all India traveling assignment by my then employers and I had to leave my new bride at her maternal home for the duration.

At the end of that assignment, I got promoted into the management side and was at the receiving end of daily reports and orders from customers as well as writing a large number of letters and reports to customers and the head office. All these were through the Indian Posts and that practice continued well into my working life till faxes and telexes took over and eventually the mobile telephones and computers with emails.

For the past twenty years, I have stayed put in one place and have established a good rapport with the post office that is responsible for our area and its employees, particularly the two postmen who deliver mail to us. Their service is excellent and I have had occasions to take up their cause with truant despatch departments of magazines who tend to blame them for internal dislocations, resulting in my not receiving subscribed for magazines.

It is however sad that such a vital service oriented department, by and large very humane and efficient, finds its importance gradually eroding due to other faster means of communications. Courier companies have taken away a large chunk of their business and despite coming out with innovative new products, the department is unable to compete with the more efficient couriers who offer both collection and delivery services.

Sadly, I have met young people who have no idea of what role the Indian Post has played in the history of their country and find it quaint that we depended so much on snail mail and money orders. This is an attempt at informing them what an important part of life was the Indian Postal system for people of my and older generations.

Tags: Mail, Money Orders, Pen Pals, Post

There has been much coverage in the local and British newspapers about students being punished in schools and being harmed or being driven to suicide. This article in the Telegraph will give you an idea of the situation.

Just the other day, I read another news item about our Central Minister waxing eloquent on Indian education. What he said is unimportant, but the occasion drew my attention. It was a Kuruvilla Jacob Memorial Lecture. My antenna went up as Mr. Kuruvilla Jacob was the Prinicipal of a school where I studied for four years before getting my School Leaving Certificate. The Madras Christian College School. The link gives you a broad idea about the man and the esteem he is held in by his students.

Mr. Jacob will be remembered by thousands of students from the three schools where he left his imprint. I have nothing but great respect for him and the way he punished some of us, including me. I had met him on a number of occasions after leaving school at Chennai, Hyederabad and Bombay and he always remembered me straight off and would graciously congratulate me on my, then small, achievements.

The other teachers in the school did punish their students, usually by asking them to stand up on the bench for the duration of the class or by sending them out of the class. Both punishments invited trouble depending on whether Mr Jacob took his rounds during the time that the punishment took place. If it did, the student was called to his room where a cane was kept and depending on the seriousness of the occasion, the number of canings was decided by him. One stretched out one’s non writing palm and the cane swished down leaving a welt.

For many of us, getting caned by Mr. Jacob was equivalent to getting a badge of honour. I got many I can assure you. I doubt that any old student of Mr. Jacob can be found who will say that he was unjustly punished or was driven to suicidal tendencies by the punishment meted out by the teachers and/or the Principal of their highly regarded school. I doubt also that you will find any person of my generation or perhaps even a couple of younger generations complaining about the punishments that they received in their school.

I personally believe that excess parenting and molly coddling of children are making them into what Bikehikebabe so effectively calls namby pambies. Are we producing wimps? Or have we already produced wimps who in turn are producing wimps?

Tags: Caning, Madras Chrisitian College School, Principal

Last Friday, I sat in my favourite garden chair in our veranda in the afternoon having my tea and was also absorbed in reading a book at the same time. A butterfly looking very much like the one pictured above, came gently and sat on my forearm resting on the arm of the chair. I stopped reading and drinking the tea lest it gets disturbed and enjoyed watching it slowly fluttering its wings for quite some time before it flew away.

Pune is partly located in the Western Ghats, our mountain ranges in the Western part of India. This is home to many varieties of butterflies and many are very rare. For those interested, this site will give some fascinating information.

When Urmeela was alive, she used to sit in our verandah during the day time besides the early mornings when both of us would sit there having our morning tea. I used to join her sometimes in the day time too, when I had nothing calling for my attention inside the house. On many occasions, both of us have had butterflies sit on some part of our bodies and we would always be very happy when that happened.

Since her passing away, this was the first time when this happened and I went through a period of intense longing for those days. It is difficult to explain that particular experience, but it was like as though she had come in the form of the butterfly to give me a message. Vivid imagination, I said to myself, rather than a paranormal experience! Ashok, I hope you do not mind!

What about you? Have you had some extraordinary experiences like this?

Tags: Butterflies, Longing, Paranormal experience, Veranda, Vivid imagination

My friend Anil went down memory lane to come up with this post about his childhood and the problems of semi rural/rural India of the forties and early fifties. While in some parts of India, some of the older people still follow some of these beliefs, these have mostly disappeared.

Anil personally, grew out of this background, became an Artillery officer and fought wars beside getting wounded in action too. The first time I met Anil and his lovely wife Nina was when I was on a hospital bed recovering from my first surgery for a hip replacement. In earlier days, a visit to the hospital itself would have been considered a defilement!

Without much ado, I take you to the post to give you an idea of India of a long distant past.

“My childhood was completely governed by severe and conservative middle class Brahminical customs and rules. These were meant to be followed at every single breath and the simplest act of crossing a street meant violating at least a few of them.

In a society riddled with many castes, life was made even more difficult by innumerable sub-castes who had their rules too. It might never be possible to list them since they seemed to have been designed only to ensure the Brahmins maintained their superiority.

Broadly, these customs covered External and Internal defilement of your body. Therefore, on your way to school or office you were advised to stay away from strangers since it was presumed every person on the street was defiled in more than one way.

Naturally therefore, every defilement had a specified cleansing process that had to be followed outside the house lest you contaminate others in the family or worse, the house itself.

External defilements broadly consisted of seeing a corpse, letting a sweeper crossing your path or even touching a menstruating lady in the family. In fact these ladies made sure they banished themselves to one of the back rooms dedicated for the purpose and stayed there until they cleansed themselves. Use of leather articles like shoes and purses was forbidden as was touching anything with the left hand. My younger brother, who was left-handed, and otherwise an asset as a sportsman, had the most torrid time at home. Our grandmother’s only job was to correct him. He couldn’t touch any food with his left or write or even touch her.

Internal defilements were principally around food and beverages. Milk was hawked by people who couldn’t be touched but the milk they sold was acceptable! I suspect liquor was a “NO” anytime but in retrospect, I wonder why men spent a week-end out of town every month!

Defilements, external or internal, were a matter of principles which were purely a matter of convenience depending upon work, time and place.

And so while we grew up, one day on return of my father from one of his trips my brother, then seven, challenged these customs and flung his food and anything he could get hold of around the house. My father, a soft spoken timid man, joined him and soon we were all flinging things around. Finally, a shocked grandmother tearfully decided only she would follow her customs and rules and we could do as we pleased. We’ve never looked back since.”

And Anil, thank God for that!

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• Marriage, Divorce And Just Being Single.
• If I could travel in Time, I would……..”
• Visitor.

Tags: Defilement, Hinduism of the past, Personal defilements

The East India Company from London came to India in the year 1600. It was the forerunner of British Colonial rule over the entire Indian subcontinent, currently called South Asia.

All Indians of my generation and before learnt all about the EIC and how they were replaced by direct Crown rule as part of our history lessons. Such history has tended to get diluted subsequently and perhaps many modern students may not be even aware of the role played by the East India Company.

Earlier this year, we came to know that an Indian has bought out the East India Company and was in the process of turning it into a departmental stores.

Today, it is a vibrant organization with a clear vision of where it wants to go.

There will not be many Indians who will feel as deeply about this development as I do. I am sure that those who do, will join me in saluting Sanjiv Mehta.

Conrad, another hero that I wish had been me!

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• Kick The Bums Out.
• The Lost Mobile Phone.
• The MBA.

Tags: British colonial India, East India Company, Sanjiv Mehta