Life Back Then

Savithri Natarajan, now a homemaker who lives in Chennai, has travelled a great deal, in India and in other parts of the world. Her interest in History has helped her enjoy those travels, especially as regards her fascination with the temples of India. She has taught high school and been a Vice-Principal. In addition, she has helped some underprivileged children to become literate. She now spends her time reading, following the current news, and listening to music and spiritual talks. She is also interested in needlecraft. She believes that her early education, upbringing, and close family ties have made her what she is today.

Editor’s introduction. This is Chapter 1 of a book of family memories, edited and produced by Kamakshi Balasubramanian and her husband Mohan Raj. The book, Moments in Time: A Family Remembers, has already been privately printed. The Introduction is available here: http://www.indiaofthepast.org/editors-kamakshi-balasubramanian-mohan-raj...

. Kamakshi Balasubramanian, an educator and occasional writer, lives in Mysore in calm retirement. She enjoys reading and listening to good fiction, as well as books on history. She regularly plays bridge and one or two addictive computer games; she tries to stay healthy, has a few patchwork projects on hand at all times, and is committed to the practice of vipassana. Her life’s richness comes from the varied people she has known. She loves languages and knows English, Russian, and Hindi, in addition to her mother tongue, Tamil.

. A long-time resident of Hyderabad, D.R. Mohan Raj has lived in retirement since 2010 in Mysore, in southern India. A communications professional who worked across continents, he taught University courses in Journalism and Business Communication for one half of his professional career, and edited research and academic publications during the other half. He enjoys reading and watching Sports, especially Cricket and Tennis.

Editor’s introduction. We are happy to introduce here a family memory book edited and produced by Kamakshi Balasubramanian and her husband Mohan Raj. The book, Moments in Time: A Family Remembers, has already been privately printed. The whole book will be added as a downlodable pdf fie, once all the chapters have been posted on this website.

This article reproduces the front and end pages. The individual chapters will be posted on this website over the next few days.

Mahen Das studied mechanical engineering at IIT BHU. He retired from Shell International, in 2002, after 43 years of work in their petroleum refineries and gas plants. He practiced as an independent consultant until 2009. His learning and experience has been acquired from hands-on work, at all levels of asset management, at 40 sites in 22 countries. This includes Process Management, Maintenance Management, Engineering Management and Optimisation of reliability, Integrity and availability of plants. Mahen is a co-author of Case Studies in Maintenance & Reliability. He plays golf and bridge.

Editor’s note: The author’s memories of Lahore 1937-1945 are available here. http://www.indiaofthepast.org/mahen-das/life-back-then/my-memories-lahore-1937-1945

Our home and daily life

In 1946 Papaji was transferred to his company, The Delhi Cloth and General Mills (DCM), headquarters, Delhi. We moved there in April of that year. We were given accommodation in the company officer’s housing compound at Rohtak Road, Karol Bagh.

Mahen Das studied mechanical engineering at IIT BHU. He retired from Shell International, in 2002, after 43 years of work in their petroleum refineries and gas plants. He practiced as an independent consultant until 2009. His learning and experience has been acquired from hands-on work, at all levels of asset management, at 40 sites in 22 countries. This includes Process Management, Maintenance Management, Engineering Management and Optimisation of reliability, Integrity and availability of plants. Mahen is a co-author of Case Studies in Maintenance & Reliability. He plays golf and bridge.

I was born on October 12 1937 in Kila Gujjar Singh, Lahore, which was then a part of India. My ancestors came, a few generations ago, from Afghanistan and settled in Leiah, a village in district Dehra Ismail Khan, North Western Frontier Province. They owned land which was tilled by hired labour. Leiah was on the bank of river Sindh. They were also de facto leaders of the minority Hindu community in the predominantly Muslim province. Because they had built a Krishna temple in Leiah and did other services to the community, they were awarded the title of Gosain.

Subhash Mathur is a resident of Jaipur, after his superannuation from the Indian Revenue Service in 2007. Presently, Subhash is engaged in social and charitable work in rural areas. Subhash is also Editor of http://www.inourdays.org/, an online portal for preserving work-related memories.

My earliest memory of International cricket goes back to 1956. At that point of time, I was living in Bikaner, where my father, Shri Khemchand, was posted as Collector & District Magistrate upon transfer from Jhalawar.

List of Bikaner Collectors, starting November 1949. My father was the fifth Collector of Bikaner, from February 1954 to September 1957.

We used to live in the huge bungalow earmarked for the Collector of the District. The same bungalow is being used by the Collector at present also.

Collector’s Residence, Bikaner. Photo is recent but looked the same in the 1950s.

Pradeep Kumar Banga was born in Narsinghpur, Madhya Pradesh, where his father worked in the Government’s Public Works Department after leaving Bannu for India.

Pradeep did his Mechanical Engineering from Maulana Azad College of Technology (now NIT), Bhopal in 1977, and joined Steel Authority of India Limited in May 1978. He retired from the Bhilai Steel Plant in Dec 2015.

Author’s note: I was born in India after Independence. Hence, all the information I have about Bannu, which went to Pakistan, is through what I have heard from my elders.

My grandparents’ generation

My grandfather, Dr. Partool Chand Banga, practiced medicine in Bannu. He got his LMP (Licensed Medical Practitioner) degree from Agra in 1922.

T.S. Nagarajan (b.1932) is a noted photojournalist whose works have been exhibited and published widely in India and abroad. After a stint with the Government of India as Director of the Photo Division in the Ministry of Information, for well over a decade Nagarajan devoted his life to photographing interiors of century-old homes in India, a self-funded project. This foray into what constitutes the Indianness of homes is, perhaps, his major work as a photojournalist.

Chikkanayakanahalli is a small town about 130 km from Bangalore. I still remember vividly that a group of people – volunteers for the Independence movement – stopped my friends and me as we were walking to our school. They snatched the felt hat I was wearing and threw it on a bonfire of clothes. As the rising flames swallowed my hat, I felt a sense of shock at losing my precious possession and walked back home, crying all the way. It was the Quit India year, 1942.

On the day India became independent, I was a schoolboy in a small town called Doddaballapur in Karnataka. My father was the doctor in charge of the government hospital there. We lived in a small ‘out house’, a two-room block, behind a local jeweller’s mansion. My mother and the rest of the family were in Mysore, about 180 km away.

Veena is a scholar in African studies, in which she has a PhD from JNU, Delhi, and Vedanta, in which she is self-taught. She retired as the Head of All-India Radio's Swahili Service, broadcasting every day in Swahili for 22 years. For over 15 years, she has taught the philosophy of leisure at the International Centre of Excellence, Wageningen, Netherlands. She is the author of Kailash Manasarovar: A Saced Journey (Roli Books 2004). In recent years she has given talks on the Upanishads in many countries. At present, she is the Chairperson of Prajna Foundation, an NGO dedicated to educational and cultural activities, and the development of economically non-privileged youth and children

In 1947, I was six, getting on to seven. My parents, elder brother, a younger sister and I were living in Balloki, a small township in western part of undivided Punjab, located on the site of a headworks from where the Bari Doab canal emerged from the Ravi River. My father, the Executive Engineer in charge of the headworks, had been posted there three years earlier.

Apart from my parents and siblings, there were a lot of people around in our household, all of whom seemed to be like members of our extended family. Called by different names or designations like chowkidars, malis, beldars, orderlies, mates and so on, they were in and out of the house at all times of day and night.

Shenoi, a civil engineer and MBA, rose to the rank of Deputy Director-General of Works in the Indian Defence Service of Engineers. He has also been a member of HUDCO’s advisory board and of the planning team for Navi Mumbai. After retirement he has been helping NGOs in employment-oriented training, writing articles related to all aspects of housing, urban settlements, infrastructure, project and facility management and advising several companies on these issues.His email id is mpvshanoi@gmail.com.

In the early part of the 20th century, the former Princely State of Mysore, covering the southern part of the Deccan plateau, had an excellent network of water tanks (lake), with water overflow from one tank draining into a downstream tank, and so conserving water to the extent possible without any modern technology (see Annex for more details.

However, since these tanks, with their stagnant water, were also associated with malaria, over time many of the tanks within and near the major towns were drained out.

By the time I was ten years old, in the 1940s, in Mysore city we had only the Kukkarhalli tank at the western end and the Karanji tank at the eastern end near the zoo. Both were in disrepair, yet they were the source of pleasure and adventure for boys like me who loved the outdoors. These were the places where boys from the poorer families could learn how to swim, perform crude aquatics, and catch fish. Though there were a few swimming pools in Mysore, they were in palaces or hotels, and few people had access to them. So, the tanks did attract a sizable number of people.

Dinesh, born 1936, studied commerce and won gold medals for his academic excellence. A certificated associate of the Indian Institute of Bankers, he held many key positions during his 36 years with the State Bank of India (SBI), including co-founder and Vice-Principal, SBI Staff College, and CEO SBI California, USA. He retired as Deputy Managing Director SBI, on deputation to State Bank of Indore as its Managing Director. He loves music, reading, writing, travelling He lives with his wife in New Delhi, while his children and grandchildren reside in USA.

My father, late Shri Harish Chandra Sanghi, was one of the ten children (seven brothers and three sisters) of a family living in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. He went for his education to Banaras Hindu University and Allahabad University. In the late 1930s, my parents settled down in Lucknow – the capital city of what was United Provinces in those days, renamed Uttar Pradesh after Independence. Prior to British rule, the area was called Awadh, though the British usually spelled it as Oudh.