BY PRAGYAN SHARMA POLAVARAPU
(1)
This matter is written --almost copied from a very old dairy of mine discovered after
22years accidentally during a casual
search of a cabinet containing old
books. The diary was not a simple old book but acted like a cinema projector generating images of
22 years back when I read it page by page, sentence by sentence! There was
date wise narration, in total a matter of about sixty pages in a continuous section of the book ,about a visit to Mysuru and Ooty at that time.
I remember the trip well even now as it
was such a wonderful trip to a beautiful
cool neat city of palaces,temples and gardens. Mysuru ( in faraway southern
Karnataka state about 800 kilometers from Hyderabad) is one of the cleanest
cities of India with a cool pleasant climate and is also famous wide and
straight streets with gorgeous royal buildings and great educational
institutions reminding of old royal
glory. More important for me , I underwent induction training for my entry into
Indian Postal department (then called Indian Posts and Telegraphs department)
at Mysuru city. And our training center was a real royal palace (purchased by
our department for many crores of
rupees)from the Maharaja of Mysore! We had our lectures in the royal halls for full three months staying in hostels right in the royal campus . The
palace had huge grounds , a vast cricket ground and vast rose gardens.
After 35
years of long service in the postal
department I chose, for my “ travel -anywhere -in-India” free trip offered by
government to retiring employees , a visit to Mysuru and Ooty along with my
family. This trip took place 22years ago! I found a
long detailed narration of that
trip in the pages of the old diary. After a few years I altogether forgot the
diary but not the memories of that nice trip.
As is
natural none can remember the daily and hourly details of any events that happened 22 years before, however
interesting they may be. But to my
surprise such minute details of the trip were recorded in that diary ! When I casually opened the diary and read some sections randomly ,the old imagery opened on my mind’s screen as
if projected by a film projector. The images coming out of the old written
words—truly sentence by sentence-- quite overwhelmed me . I wondered at the power of written words.
But to read old
bulky text in faded ink is a task. It would
indeed be impossible -- a slow torturous
work to read the entire sixty page text.
So I simply coped the entire text
blindly a few pages a day -- with all grammar mistakes, idiomatic mistakes,
unnecessary extra words etc-- into the laptop and then started to edit it . The ink in the handwritten matter spread
on the old paper and often discouraged me to start my big project. But
the journey to those beautiful cool places imprinted a never to be forgotten memory in me even
after so many years and the “project” became interesting. I took up the work with much
enthusiasm.
(2)
The Postal
Department of Government of India ,we always
proudly declare , provided since 150
years back many services to the common man-- whether of
the big towns and cities or the faraway villages. For example through the invaluable
Money Order service operated through the cycle riding uniformed simple postman
, small amounts like even rs 50/- or 100/-sent by a son working in a
faraway city , are paid within just two or three days to a poor old father or
loving mother living in the village .The
post card brings a bundle of news from a
son or daughter to parents living in a faraway village home. In olden days believe or
not, the farmer or vegetable vendor could deposit in his postal savings bank account in the village post
office amounts as small as Rs10/- or Rs 20/- remaining at the end of
yesterday’s spending. He could do it as stylishly as a rich city dweller depositing a thousand in a city bank.
For 150
years the telegram marked with special
codes like x and xx brought in minutes
from any corner of India to any other corner of India ( travelling over the
telegraph wires coming over hills and
dales) important family news —marriage of a son or daughter, birth of a child, securing a job, passing
examination or even a shattering news of
a death. Messages of death were given highest
priority in transmission and swept all other telegrams aside for a few minutes till the sad message
reached the destination.
****
The Postal
Training Colleges train officials from the cadre of postal counter assistants
to the cadres of postal inspectors and high officers of Indian Postal Service. The
institute at Mysuru is one of three or four such institutions in India .They not only impart the first induction training to new entrants but also impart training in management, modernization,
computerization, mechanization etc of Postal services which
handles mountain loads of postal
traffic every day.
I always
treasured the memories of the beautiful city of Mysuru in faraway
Karnataka with its gardens
,palaces,temples, scientific and educational institutes(which gave the city a
modern progressive image) ,its wide and
tidy streets and the “millions” of coconut trees . I well remember my two visits to the hill
station Ooty in high Nilgiris mountains. While in service in the Indian department of posts
till 20 years back , I visited all those
places and many other places like Srirangapatna and the most wonderful Belur
and Halebidu temples (visited frequently by foreign tourists to wonder at the exquisite beauty of the Indian
sculptural art). I visited some of these places two or three times ,first in
the institute’s bus and later in small
friends groups. The friends were from all southern states and I remember some
names even now . In the
“journey-to-any-place-in-India” free trip described in the diary I went
with my family to specially to Mysuru and Ooty as I very much wanted to
show those places to them.
(3)
Now,(i.e. after 22 long years!) as I typed the matter, each sentence spread on my mind’s screen a mesmerising picture of a palace, a picturesque
hill scenery, a garden of mesmerising beauty etc. The work which I thought
boring became most absorbing and I typed 2000 to 3000 words per day and a total
of about 12,000 words in a week setting aside every other work. Here and there
I had to offer a little explanation connecting that old world to the present
world! 22 years back I wrote with a “rural like” simple mind as I had still
no access to or knowledge of Wikipedia ,Face
Book etc and the several Internet sites.
I did not yet use the table computer
though I was a physics graduate.
The old world of 60 years back when I joined the grand postal
department ( as a postal counter assistant) was a world of long distance rail journeys, radios, Vivid
Bharathi programs and newspapers made of real cellulose paper. Even the black
and white TV broadcasting only agricultural programs and a few dull serials appeared
in India about that time. In those days we did not know the e-newspapers that now dance on the computer screen. We could not
even imagine a future with silly new
e-things like iPads, Tablets, USBs ,cell phones and streaming
Internet . Now even air journeys have
become so common as in the West of 70,80 years ago .Sixty years back we had to run to a cinema hall to
see good English/Hindi films or old Telugu gems . Now however we are fed up with the hundreds of TV channels and often long for that old calm world to return.
Here I
simply reproduce the sentences in the old dairy of 22 years back about our Mysuru
trip because to read it proved to me as interesting as reading a long travel story. Some details are
rather stale but were necessary.
Mysuru is
at a distance of 800 kilometers from our
city Hyderabad. Both my daughters are computer qualified and live in distant
cities. My elder married daughter a
postgraduate in computer applications lives in Bengaluru. My younger daughter
was at that time in final year of a
degree course in computer science.
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