Rewind

Its remarkable that only nine years ago, final year students at IIT were the only students in the entire country to have email accounts.

The routine: cycle to the computer centre, leave your footwear at the entrance, and power up a monochrome unix terminal with a sense of importance. Type ‘mail’ and the terminal would spew out a screen full of bright-green lines of text. And you would then breathlessly scan the green maze for some evidence of the words “Dear xxx, Congratulations on your admission to the University of Tuscaloosa” or some such. More often though, you would wade through and discover that the admissions committee regretted that it had to deny admission to many fine applicants such as yourself.

In either eventuality you would pack up quickly, wear someone else’s chappals and head to Tarams for a cup of s p tea.

Looking around today at the cell-phone-carrying auto-drivers and the proliferation of ATMs, it seems hard to believe that only nine years ago, I had never used a credit card.

The Spanish Connection

I recently went to a birthday party composed of a largely Spaniard crowd. Then, somewhere along the way, in the middle of a tortilla, it struck me that the Spanish must have colonized India at some point in the past. They kept saying 'Bale, bale' - in vaguely Bhangra-esque distortions - at regular intervals. At other times, they would exclaim 'Mira, mira'. Then, someone would ask about someone else's holiday in Balencia, and that person would say it was Bery Good, Bery Good. Suspiciously Bengali.

Historians might struggle to prove this, but I think there's a connection somewhere.