Madras miscellany

Vanishing columns

A FEW weeks abroad recently and, with all the boxes my good lady loaded me with while turning me loose on my own, it was the trusted typewriter that I had to sacrifice. Whereupon, I had no choice but to discover the computer. Whoever had heard of a manual typewriter over there?! It was a struggle finishing my columns, but I did find that at a press of the mouse it reached The Hindu thousands of miles away and, a few days later, there I was reading it in The Hindu on the Net before you even saw it in your paper! This successful operation emboldened my editor at The Hindu to suggest, a few weeks later, that I use the air waves and not the roads of Madras to deliver my pieces. And so I decided to take a chance. Believe it or not, Madras being Madras, the column just vanished into thin air - not once, but three times! That's when I thought it best to return to tried and tested ways - and have had no mail vanishing since.

Both my editor and I, however, were intrigued by this vanishing act. But I soon found consolation. The latest issue of the American Information Centre, Delhi, magazine, Span, had a feature I throughly enjoyed. Under the headline "Your Mail has Vanished", Michael Specter wondered about "what happens to the messages you never get".

He had one day discovered that "somewhere between my desk, in Rome, and a friend's, in Manhattan, the note disappeared - vanishing among the millions of similarly unimportant messages that must have crossed the Atlantic that day." Most people seem to accept these periodic losses as part of a cyberian life. Specter went on, but unlike them, he decided to do something about the mystery. And so he began the great search into the innards of his Internet service provider.

When from Rome he was eventually put through to a woman at an answering service in Dublin, "she laughed, obviously having encountered people like me before". But Specter was not to be put off like the others; "I wanted to know how something can simply disappear into a telephone wire and never come out again". Eventually, he wound up in an "unremarkable 11-storey office building" in suburban Chicago which was his service provider's main distribution centre and was "told straight off that you can never fully trace a lost e-mail". He was also told by another resident expert, "E-mail isn't as different from regular mail as people think". Obviously, as some pieces CAN get lost and DO. Only millions more get through, which made Specter happy. But I still keep worrying about what vanished into thin air in less than five kilometres!

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Different wavelengths

If I read into the Span article some sympathy for my dinosaurian and cynical attitude to computers, I was soon to get my come- uppance, when I discovered that my typewriter also gets wayward. I do all my writing, pecking on a 40-year-old manual Olivetti and over the years we have discovered we think at the same speed as each other. So, we get along very well, thank you. But that was till the other day, when I was writing my July 24 piece.

That's the day the Olivetti decided that Sir Frederick Price, of 19th Century vintage, had retired from the 'IAS'. Reader L. N. Sriman, who has had two brothers in that post-Independence service, was quick to point out that "surely, there was no I.A.S. in the mid-19th Century". Surely there was not; what there was, was the I.C.S. Now if the Olivetti had been a computer it would have underlined 'IAS', not because it thought it was wrong, but because it had not heard of it. And if that had happened, may be I would have taken a second look at the erroneous substitution of 'A' for 'C'. So, a computer can on occasion be helpful, it would seem!

There've also been a few letters wondering who that imposing- looking man was in the picture that accompanied that piece. He's Maha Mudaliyar Kadukeralu Don Solomon DiasAbeywickreme Jayatilekke Senewiratne Rajakumaran Bandaranaike, CMG (before he was knighted), the grandfather of Chandrika Kumaratunga.

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Thrill of American cricket

A RECENT piece by me in the Sunday edition of The Hindu on cricket in America had the phone ringing with several callers recalling cricketing days in the American sun. The best story I was told of those days was by Timeri Murari, author, columnist and film-maker, who moved from England to the U.S. before deciding to come home to Madras.

Amongst the several books Murari wrote while in the U.S. was 'The Shooter', a novel, drawing from a television documentary he had done on the workaday lives of a couple of New York Police Department detectives with whom he had spent long shifts. One day, one of them, Detective Andy Lugo, rang him of a late afternoon and said, "You know, Tim, I'm at a park in Staten Island and there's these guys in white playing some crazy game. One's running up and whirling his arm and tossing a ball that doesn't seem to have the energy to travel 20 yards and another is swiping at it with a flat piece of wood and then everyone is running. They say it's some kind of British game called 'Cricket'. Do you know it?" Murari, a cricketer from the days he was taught the game by Grandfather Vasu Naidu - who had helped Buchi Babu launch the sport amongst Indians in Madras - laughed and replied that "It certainly sounded like it. But what in creation are you doing there?" And was stunned into silence when Lugo told him, "I'm standing here looking at a dead guy lying at my feet with a knife stuck right through him!"

Death had come at the match in Staten Island to a drug-pusher who had welshed, Murari later found out. The 'pusher' may have been on the run, but in those days could you keep a West Indian away from cricket?! In those days too, the West Indian crowds were large for matches at Staten Island and Rundall's Island - which is where I saw "our Bradman", George Headley, may be long past his playing days but still a stroke-ful joy to behold.

Another I heard from was Sujit Mukherjee, Editor Emeritus of Orient Longman's who once used to spend a lot of time in Madras when he was this publishing house's Chief Editor. He devotes a whole chapter to the game in the U.S., particularly Pennsylvania, in his delightful book, 'Autobiography of a Unknown Cricketer'.

This memoir of a schoolboy, student, State (Bihar) and scholar cricketer recalls in the chapter 'Fulbright Fielder' that "before my first year in America (1961) was over, I was playing one match every weekend, sometimes two, through the long American summer on the east coast from mid-May to late August. This was repeated the following summer." Remembering in the book his match at Haverford College, where "the gradient on either slope away from the wicket was enough for a prostrate cover-point to remain invisible to mid-wicket even if the latter stood upright", he now wrote, "the beautiful photograph with your article made me feel quite nostalgic." I was surprised how many others it made feel the same way.

S. MUTHIAH

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