The first part can be read here.
A decent time had lapsed to come with part
2. With the characters we had, and the endless anecdotes that bring a smile to
my face on reminiscence, this series might run forever. And after.
No documentation of our steel shop days can
ever be complete without the mention of the maddest of them all.
Sanjay Sud.
Most of you must be familiar with this
classic definition in Catch-22.
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which
specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were
real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could
be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no
longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly
more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If
he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was
sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this
clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
Thus if the entry requisite to a steel shop
was, that one had to be insane, Sud in fact over qualified for the job!
😊
Melt me if you can
There were two furnaces, named Calcutta and
Delhi (the readers must be now familiar with the Alice in Wonderland atmosphere
of a steel shop) and this was supplied with a common track that carried the
scrap basket.
The scrap basket was manipulated by the
carne and emptied into the furnace when the furnace was ready.
On those rare moments, when both the
furnaces were ready to receive the scrap, the scrap usually went to Calcutta
furnace. The reason was simple. It was managed by one gigantic R.V.Kumar, sadly
no more with us, who was simply known as Ravan.
No one messed with Ravan and the Delhi
furnace usually waited, incurring a delay, which led to some not so pleasing
moments the next day with Mr. Ghosh.
This was before Sud became in charge of
Delhi furnace.
The moment arrived. The crane driver was
looking down from his cabin to the platform where both Ravan and Sud were
waving their fists and directing the crane driver to load their furnace.
History had enough evidence that the scrap basket would go to Calcutta.
Sud is unaccustomed to losing without a
fight.
He jumped on to the scrap basket and sat on
top of the scrap in a Buddhist monk’s penance position and dared both the crane
driver and Ravan to go ahead.
You will melt me too was his
battle cry.
Ravan was strong but was no match for the
sheer lunacy of Sud.
The crane driver, in the meantime, had a
small heart seizure and vacated his cabin, unwilling to be part of such
madness.
The basket went to Delhi, of course.
Shoulder to shoulder
On another occasion, Sud needed a week of
holiday. Unplanned holidays were never encouraged in a steel shop. Knowing that
his appeal will be turned down, Sud took to the most hilarious book known to
human kind, the logbook.
This is what he had written; I have tried
to repeat verbatim, but intervening years may have resulted in a slight deviation
from the original
“Dalvi-da, Have I ever let you down?
Haven’t I responded to every need of yours?
Haven’t we fought shoulder-to-shoulder the
many battles and the calamities?
And am I supposed to believe, that after
all this, you would still not sanction my, well deserved, even if unplanned,
holidays?”
Next day, Dalvi-da replied on the margin,
in handwriting that was so neat that it could have been mistaken for a print.
“Good rhetoric, leave still not sanctioned”
Check the connection
Time to get back to our beloved Subra.
One of the nightmares of repair in a steel
shop is when we had to carry out a repair on big motors. There was a risk that
on reconnection, the motor would rotate in the opposite direction. Depending on
the size of the motor and its location, the consequences of a wrong connection,
could range from a quick rewiring to a major interruption.
Out of the three wires to be connected to
their respective ports, one was a given, it was the remaining two that was
tricky.
Subra had a cast iron solution to this, of
course, as usual.
This is how Subra narrated the correct,
foolproof procedure.
“Before switching on, you must first
confirm with the shift electrician.
On his confirmation, you must proceed to
have it double checked by the shift electrical engineer.
Two checks are never enough and you must
call the electrical engineer responsible for that specific job and seek his
affirmation too.
Finally, as the last point of confirmation,
you must call the Deputy General Manager of the electrical department,
specialized in motors.
After all of them agree you must reverse the connection.
Will never fail.”
Chimney’s job is to smoke
Dalvi-da had been to Japan. On return he
picked up some goodies for friends back in India. And for Subra, the choice was
clear. A pack of Marlboro.
Those days, it was common to have people
smoking in almost all places. Inside the steel shop, the various control cabins
were always covered in a haze of smoke or at least a lingering smell of
nicotine.
Dalvi-da found Subra in one of the control
rooms, and offered him the pack of Marlboro. Subra had just finished smoking
his Gold Flake. Nevertheless, he picked one, lit and started to smoke.
Dalvi-da was waiting anxiously, and after
few minutes of no feedback, asked
“So, Subra how is the taste, Isn’t it
better than the ones you usually smoke?”
Subra blew out the smoke and replied
“Dalvi Saab, the job of the chimney is to
smoke. It does not matter whether you burn dead branch from a tree or
sandalwood”
I have a train to catch.
The job of the melters in the night shift
was usually the most difficult. On the days, when everything goes right, it was
no issues. But such days were few. People familiar with Bombay know about the
criticality of a few minutes in the morning rush hours. After the night shift,
one usually ended up travelling towards Bombay, by the local trains and the
rush in those trains are legendary. You miss your particular train, chances are
that you spend better part of an hour in making it to another train with comfort.
On the nights when things went badly in
your shift, you had to face the big task of phoning Mr. Ghosh at the end of
your shift and answer all the questions he would hurl at you. Non-performance
is not acceptable to Mr. Ghosh. What are reasons for the melter, are excuses
for Mr. Ghosh. Even God can’t save the poor soul from the inquisition that Mr.
Ghosh conducted over the phone.
It was at the end of one such night. The
melter in question was one Rao. Fairly new and not yet ingrained into the ways
of a steel shop. But he knew, having experienced before, the extent of wrath
that Mr. Ghosh could discharge in the morning. He knew that there was no way he
would be able to justify what happened.
Someone said offence is the best defense.
Rao took the road seldom traveled.
He realized surrender is the best defense.
But he went about in a quirky way.
He rang Mr. Ghosh, after an exceptionally
disastrous night shift, and said this.
“Sir, whatever abuses you have to give me,
please finish in the next 20 minutes. I have a train to catch at 7.32.”
Save road tax
The Indian organizations were cleverly
designed. From the moment a trainee engineer joins the organization, he can
look forward to a promotion every three years. The last structure I remember
was something like this.
Trainee on probation, Asst Gen Foreman, Gen
Forman, Deputy Manager, Asst Manager, Associate Manager, Manager, Senior
Manager, Superior manager, Deputy General Manager, Asst Gen Manager Gen Manager, Asst Vice President, Deputy
Vice President, Vice President, Senior Vice President, President
A promotion every three year is designed to
address a life cycle of 51 years of active service.
At some point in this cycle one is eligible
for “petrol allowance” for a car. This was good money in those days. While you
are eligible for the said allowance, it was granted only on actual possession
of a car. No one insisted that you ever actually used the car.
Many of us, bought a second hand or a third
hand car just to be eligible for the allowance. And some never ever actually
drove the car.
One such person, on whose car there was
even a cobweb running from the front wheel to the rear window, received this
pearl of wisdom from Mitra-da.
“Do one thing, please keep your four wheels
resting on some bricks, you do not have to pay road tax also”
Diwali Bonus
Mitra-da never showed partiality. He went
around messing up with everyone.
The annual bonus, a meagerly sum, was always
paid along with the salary in the month before the grand festival of India,
Diwali. Meagre it may have been, we still looked forward to it.
There was a bus service for the members of
the colony, to ferry between the colony and the nearest town, Thane.
Mitra-da and Dada were seated behind
Savita, wife of S.V. Panse.
Panse is as cool as they come, having a
lazy approach to life, never rushing anything and extremely intelligent. Savita
is innocence personified. She trusts everything and Mitra-da never tired of
pulling her leg.
On this bus trip, Mitra-da told Savita,
that for the first time Mukand had decided to give Diwali Bonus in cash, and
that afternoon all were handed envelopes consisting of INR 10,000. It was a
sizeable sum then.
Savita was surprised as Panse did not tell
her anything when he returned home.
She cut her journey short and rushed home
and confronted Panse about the bonus and why she was not informed.
There is a scene in The Good, The Bad and
The Ugly in which Elli Wallach says
“When you gotta shoot, shoot! Don’t talk”
Panse’s replay was equally legendary. He
took just few microseconds to process the question, and this was his reply.
“Did you meet Mitra on the bus?”
Grammar, rest in peace.
Back to another episode of N.S. Joshi and
Mr. Ghosh.
Mr. Ghosh was making his morning rounds
(more a tiger on a prowl) and he encountered N.S. Joshi near the scrap yard.
The conversation went thus.
“Who is the scrap yard in charge?”
“I is the scrap yard in charge”
“Oh , you are!”
“Yes, I are”
PVNR assassinated
It was circa 1994. I stayed back after office hours, due to a
trial procedure that was being tried in the steel shop. I had to wait for about
2 hours to see the result. I could have gone home, but the necessity to return,
in case something did not proceed right, was enough of a deterrent to hang
around.
I had time to kill. A PC in front of me.
The writer in me was never at rest. I started to compose a fake newspaper first
page.
It was on a A3 page, printed in portrait,
with enough bold face and Type 60 fonts etc.
While I do not have a copy of that
“masterpiece” I tried to re-create what it looked like, from my memory.
It looked something like this
Having made it, and printed it out, I
completed the act by pinning it on to the notice board in the Steel shop office
and left.
A writer needs an audience, right?
I went home and as was the norm in those
days, slept for a while, before proceeding to shower and dinner.
Around 9 pm in the night, phone calls
started coming in from the shop floor. Most wanted me to turn on the TV and
check if our Prime Minister was really murdered.
And if the local trains are running or not!
The Bombay people were always practical.
They would mourn the death of the Prime Minister surely, but their first
priority is reaching home after the shift, and all they wanted to know was
whether the local trains were running or not.
The small joke of mine became a Californian
wildfire. People called friends in other shops. And most called their bosses.
The intercoms all over the colony was ringing nonstop.
I could not tell anyone that it was not
true. While I had no intention to hide my authorship from such a masterpiece,
the ensuing hullabaloo scared the shit out of me.
The commotion slowly died off and normalcy
returned only when people started reporting for the night shift.
Next day, around 11 a.m. Dalvi-da called me
to his office.
“Kishan – next time you want to pull a
prank like this, show a little more maturity and be a little more sensitive.
How many people were disturbed last night because of this!”
I had not confessed on my own. And no one
knew I did it. My first reaction was to disown. I started to put up a feeble
resistance.
Dalvi-da cut me short.
“No one else in steel shop can write such
good English or without spelling mistakes”
Has there ever been a better compliment
delivered to the accompaniment of a resounding slap?
I am not sure if there will be a part 3.
There could well be, as my colleagues from those years will refresh my memory
with fresh stories.
In closing I want to add one thing, as
highlighted by another friend from those days. Anand Athalye. The humor was singularly
without malice. We never laughed at someone else’s expense. It was simple,
pure, clean and often situational fun.
