Lingua Franca

So, the British thought that they would be able to make English our primary language. 

I have spent time in three places - Calcutta, Pilani and Delhi - and have collected some gems of English from these various places. I am trying to enlist as many as I can recall. Most are from first hand experience.

By the way, this is not supposed to poke fun at either Bengalis or Marwaris or Punjabis. These are just plain funny and if you can't take it like that, maybe you shouldn't read any further.

A (C),(P),(D) will tell you where the collectible originated.

And Words Are All I Have...

Plantick (C) : What the other team gets when you foul their player in your own 'D' area in a game of football

Bridge (C) : Wind

Breeze (C) : Man-made structure connecting two non-contiguous land masses

Cambis Ball (C) : A tennis ball (I guess it comes from canvas ball)

Pum (rhymes with bum)-chaar (C)/Pin-chaar (D/P) : What you have when air leaks out of your vehicle tyre

Krunt (rhymes with grunt) (D) : The quantity you get when you divide voltage by impedance

Sport (D) : To prop up (emotionally or physically or mechanically)

Cartilage (P) : The small container inside your printer which holds the ink

Now For Some Phrases...

Jeevan Matrill (P) : Not Marwari for Life Insurance, but an alternative pronunciation used by some instructors for g-i-v-e-n m-a-t-e-r-i-a-l

Double up (C) : Used with abandon at a school in Calcutta (where I spent two years) by teachers (and hence also the students) to imply "Quicken your pace". Everytime I have heard that I have wanted to tell them that it should be either "On the double" or "Hurry up" but I usually laughed so hard that I actually doubled up...

Banging : Oooh! This is a good one. 95% of the faculty at a certain institution use this to imply castigation. I actually had to listen to this from a warden with a straight face - "Every night I am out with the students and as a result my wife bangs me. Every night I get banged by my wife and these buggers are still making a noise outside". Kinky!

Go For Togetherness (P) : Do something simultaneously. Example sentence construction - "Since the dates for the two conferences we are about to host are clashing, we will go for togetherness"

Complete Bloopers...

"It gets very hot in Goa in summer so the campus there is air-cooled"

One of the erstwhile hot-shots at an institution (who thankfully left the same) in a public gathering to students. The average maximum temperature at Goa is below 34 degrees Celcius by the way.

"I can't understand why we need research."

Another erstwhile hot-shot of the same institution (again who has left) in a faculty meeting during a discussion on research at the institution. I was so traumatised that I like to believe till date that I heard that wrong. I am sure its because he had difficulty conversing in English.

"Together we will have a huge technical orgasm" (D)

The speaker in his genuine attempt to inspire our design group to greater heights left out the "ni" syllable in the last word.

"The engine is very spacious" (D)

A very attractive girl to me in the showroom when I was trying to decide which car to buy.

"The electronics industry was bludgeoning then..." (P)

Ummm...I said that to a class of 250 students. I meant burgeoning.

Icing on the cake...

And finally, the jewel in the crown. 

For over a year, my phone bill from Airtel Rajasthan has arrived with a peculiar line in the address. They spelt my name wrong and I forgave that but this line really got me doubting that I didn't know enough about Pilani even after spending so much time here.

For a year I remained convinced that Pilani was referred to as the City of Inwar by the locals.

Till I remembered that I had once told the Airtel Rajasthan Customer Care that I lived inside the college campus. And then it dawned on me.

I'm including a snapshot of my phone bill address area. Can anyone crack this one? Cryptic crossword solvers should have a head start.

History Demystified

In case you didn't realise the revolution I was talking about in the previous post, here's what was happening in the world.

The oldest radio that my grandfather had was built with vacuum tubes - the only "switches" available to the world of electrical engineering then. The smaller ones which came after this had these vacuum tubes replaced with transistors. That meant that it took less space and transmission was immediately available as the transistors were devices which required no heating up time.

'AM' or Amplitude Modulation was the only medium of radio transmission for a very long time. 'FM' or Frequency Modulation came much later on. The communication engineers had been in a phase of great creativity. (I remembered all this vividly during my Communication Systems course at BITS Pilani. I made a 'D' in that course.)

I also had shivers up my spine when I read Tom Lee's book a few years back and he talked about the 'V.HOLD' (vertical hold) control on old television sets and how it was the first rudimentary phase locked loop (PLL) which needed to be manually locked from time to time. 

The BMW toy car that I had was one of the earliest things I saw which had put to good use the advances in mechanical and electrical engineering and the first example of a decision making (feedback) circuit that I saw.

Sinclair Research was a spectacular company. The early 1980's saw a spurt in commercial products utilising man's ability to make transistors smaller and fit on integrated board in chip form - and Sir Clive Sinclair was one of the first on the bandwagon. My cousins' computer was a ZX Spectrum. A massive commerical hit. It's heart was a VLSI chip known as a microprocessor. It was called the Zilog80 - Z80 in short.

(I shall be forever grateful to these cousins of mine. I knew about microprocessor machine code when I was 12 years old. Too bad I didn't own a computer then.)

Sinclair Research failed because of one solitary reason - it was incredibly ahead of its time. It was trying to do things technology would be able to realise only in the future. 1984 was really the year of doom for Sinclair.

More so, because in 1984 a young feller by the name of Steve Jobs introduced to the world a revolutionary new machine. It was called the Apple Macintosh. It used a new input device called a "mouse" and ran a "graphical user interface" operating system called the Mac OS. (My owning the MacBook today is my way of being a part of this legacy.)

The PC's which followed were a result of the rapid shrinking in transistor sizes. They stayed the same size but became more and more powerful. For example, the 486 microprocessor used the same area as the 386 but also had a mathematical co-processor on chip. With the 386 if you wanted faster math, you'd have to fix a separate processor on your motherboard. It was called the 387. 

I didn't know when I tried my hand with 'V.HOLD' on my grandfather's TV set, that I would work for a chip design company in a group which dealt with PLL's. I didn't know that I would specialise in integrated circuits which brought my beloved computers to my doorstep and eventually on to my lap. When I saw the first "transistor radio" I didn't know that many years later I would have the opportunity to teach to hundreds of people, the nuances of the device that made this fascinating gadget a reality.

When in 2001, I stood for the first time in front of more than two hundred people and proudly said, "The first edition of the Pentium has 42 million transistors on two centimetre square silicon", I knew that in a way I was fulfilling a prophecy. I was paying silent homage to the solitary transistor in the famous transistor radio.

Do you see how proud a flagbearer I am?

When I Witnessed History...

My life has been extraordinary. Not at all because of what I've made of it, but because of the many wonderful things that I have been able to witness and experience. Once I saw a historical transition. I didn't know how much it would have to do with my life today...

Back in Calcutta, we still did the joint family thingie then. My father stayed in the same house with his two other brothers and my grandparents. My grandfather had a radio. But if you try to think hard and think of a radio, you wouldn't be able to imagine my grandfather's radio. It was a biggish box. Really big. It would occupy a tabletop all by itself. There were lots of dials and a mystic yellow light came out and there was a band of bright green line of light on a dial somewhere...

Anyway, there were family get togethers in front of the radio. 

He later got a smaller one which you had to shake really hard from time to time to keep going. It was like a fat book. The design on the dial was terrible and a nightmare to use. It eventually broke and something in my subconscious memory tells me that I had a hand in the anti-engineering feat.

My father tells me that one day my uncle walked in with a small radio held to his ear. The excitement in the Mitra household was palpable as everyone converged to see this new marvel, which could be carried around wherever you went. It was the size of a grown man's palm and about an inch thick. Radio on the go!

It had another name though. It was called the "transistor radio". This became such a rage in Calcutta that very soon people began to forget part of the name - the more important part in my opinion. They started calling it the "transistor". I don't know if this happened throughout the rest of India also. (If you could tell me or find out, I'd be interested. This would be around 1980 I guess.) All radios were promptly identified as "transistors" - irrespective of caste or creed or operating frequency!

Oh I forgot to say. There was a switch on the newer transistor radios you could flick (well force to click actually, it was an extremely hard mechanical switch and required considerable force (considerable to a three year old at any rate!) to flick between the two markings of 'AM' and 'FM'. I spent a remarkable amount of time doing this flicking and as a result of this initimate dalliance with the intricacies of communication theory, I stayed confused for a very long time between the AM/FM and AM/PM pairs...

Did I mention the household TV? Colour TV's were unheard of and only very rich men had them. We had a black and white set. It was more blue and grey set actually. And sometimes the pictures just rolled from top to bottom and wouldn't stay still. You were then supposed to turn a spiky poky dial called 'V.HOLD' and things returned to normal. If that didn't work you could slap the top of the TV a few times. Last resort - switch off the TV for some time and switch it back again. Rebooting always worked - a practice Microsoft adopted with great success later on...

And then Mamma Mia and Va Va Voom! Gifts from the West! My maternal cousins (two of them) had come back after quite some time abroad. They were the foreign returns, loaded with and giving everyone absolutely fabulously amazing gifts. I got a model car (first time that I heard of BMW), battery operated and it turned and went another direction if it hit something in its way. I was a stingy child and didn't let it run for too long for fear of using up its batteries. But the coolest thing about it was that I could turn a mechanical knob on the underside of the car to make headlights pop out of its bonnet. They were battery operated as well and shone two dense circles of light. I thought that was the coolest thing anybody had ever thought of.

Then it happened. My cousins fixed up a typewriter like gadget (to their Sony colour television) and you could play games on the TV after that. It was called a computer. To load a game you had to insert a cassette and press rewind and fast forward to spin to the parts you required. Then it would display "© 1982 Sinclair Research Limited" on the screen. You could write something called a "program" and make the computer do stuff. My cousins wrote one that would draw a TV set inside the TV set - and then it would continue to draw repeatedly but each time with a different colour. I was fascinated.

I wanted a computer very badly. I was about eight years old then I think. In a year or so this same computer debuted in India and I would stare at the newspaper advertisements. My parents at that point in time could not afford the machine (it was Rs. 4500) and soon I realised that I wasn't getting one any time soon.

I can't tell you how painful the next eight years or so were. My mind was dealing with the myriad possibilities of programming and the stuff I could do with a computer. I read up programming books and knew the keyboard of this computer by heart. Sometimes I would take out my father's mechanical typewriter and pretend that it was a computer.

I begged people to let me use their computers. I knew everything about BASIC by then but had never had the opportunity of typing out a program on one. The rich kids even had "printers". These were "spark printers" and printing on them was literally a violent process because it made an awful noise and emitted sparks (hence the name) and filled the room with a mild burning smell. All that was normal of course as the printer magically transferred what was on the screen to paper.

Soon the landscape changed. Computers began to be called "personal computer" - 'PC' for short. They shipped with dedicated "monitors" and "floppy drives". The floppy diskettes were flexible (hence floppy) things (magnetic platters) which could store your programs and the monitors were miniature TV sets with seven green scan lines for each character. St. Xavier's purchased a few PC's and I shall be ever grateful to them for it, because I could finally get legal and quality time in front of these fantastic machines every week at school.

In 1994, I wrote my Class 10 board exams. As in I went in for battle, my parents said that if I did decently they would consider getting me a computer. Amazingly enough I stood first from my school. (I remember the almost decade-long wait even today. As I write this from my prized MacBook, I look up heavenwards and say "Thank You".) 

My machine was a 386DX. It had 128KB of memory and new storage device called the "hard disk" which was much faster and could store more data than the floppy - mine could store all the way upto 260MB. The monitor was no longer green but true black and white and could display upto 16384 different shades of grey. The clock speed was 133 MHz and the entire rig was assembled by a local outfit and cost over Rs. 30,000. Very soon, people started coming over to my house to use my computer - much like I had gone over to others' till recently.

Round about this time, I also heard of Apple Computers. As if the name wasn't funny enough, they sold computers named the Macintosh. My friend Chirodeep's father was an Apple computer dealer in Calcutta and all I remember is a select circle of people claiming elite status because of their association with Apple. Those were powerful machines which "professionals" used...

I don't really remember any other big technological change after that. There was the Palm and the mobile phone of course, but by then I had lost my childlike wonder.

More than two decades later however, I came back to the "transistor".

If you forgot about the historical transition that I talked about in the beginning, and didn't see it, I have another version of this story coming up.