Life Back Then

Tapas Sen was born in Kolkata (1934), and brought up in what now constitutes Bangladesh. He migrated to India in 1948, and joined the National Defence Academy in January 1950. He was commissioned as a fighter pilot into the Indian Air Force on 1 April 1953, from where he retired in 1986 in the rank of an Air Commodore. He now leads an active life, travelling widely and writing occasionally.

Editor's note: This is a slightly modified version of article that originally appeared on Air Commodore Sen's blog TKS' Tales. It is reproduced here with the author's permission.

My story today is from the memories of a six year old.

Fragmented, somewhat disjointed, but gathered assembled arranged and decorated with fanciful imagination, and then cemented with love. To understand the story, however, the reader would need a few background notes that a six-year old is not in a position to provide. For a few minutes therefore I would have to hip-hop between my ‘me’ of today to the ‘me’ of 1940, as I lay down the back ground, often from hearsay information from an era a decade before I was born.

Background

Tapas Sen was born in Kolkata (1934), and brought up in what now constitutes Bangladesh. He migrated to India in 1948, and joined the National Defence Academy in January 1950. He was commissioned as a fighter pilot into the Indian Air Force on 1 April 1953, from where he retired in 1986 in the rank of an Air Commodore. He now leads an active life, travelling widely and writing occasionally.

Editor's note: This is a slightly modified version of article that originally appeared on Air Commodore Sen's blog TKS' Tales. It is reproduced here with the author's permission.

Planting our crops

We had just moved into our new and half-finished house at Himaitpur. It was early 1943.

The riversides of Himaitpur were full of Jute growing to its full height. The flood plains along the river were a very fertile tract. The land was of course sandy and loamy\; not quite fit for the cultivation of fine varieties of rice. However, the farmers had the choice of sowing jute, sugarcane, or the aus variety of rice. Some of them also experimented with maize at times. These flood plains, known as char-land were fit only for single or double cropping while the land further inland regularly produced three crops a year.

Tapas Sen was born in Kolkata (1934), and brought up in what now constitutes Bangladesh. He migrated to India in 1948, and joined the National Defence Academy in January 1950. He was commissioned as a fighter pilot into the Indian Air Force on 1 April 1953, from where he retired in 1986 in the rank of an Air Commodore. He now leads an active life, travelling widely and writing occasionally.

Editor's note: This is a slightly modified version of article that originally appeared on Air Commodore Sen's blog TKS' Tales. It is reproduced here with the author's permission.

Passing the written test

In 1949, my first concern was getting selected for the Inter Services Wing of the Armed Forces Academy (ISW/AFA)

The syllabus for the examination, conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) for entry into the ISW/AFA was limited\; a total of three papers, one each on English, Mathematics and General Knowledge / Current Affairs.

Anand has been a print and broadcast journalist in Canada. His translations of Hindi fiction into English have been published by Penguin India and Rupa Books. He has also translated Canadian fiction writers, including the 2013 Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro into Hindi. He divides his time between Montreal, Canada and Lucknow, India.

The Ghostwas a newspaper that I wrote, published and circulated. Add to it the job of stencil cutting for printing on a cyclostyle machine, and you have the ideal candidate for the position of chief cook and bottle washer.

The place of its birth was Lucknow, the ‘City of Nawabs' 500 km southeast of Delhi, and the capital of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India. Renowned as a centre of language, poetry and fine arts, Lucknow was also a centre of higher education, with University of Lucknow being a top-rated university in India. Formed in 1920, the University included the nationally renowned King George's Medical College and Isabela Thoburn (IT) College for women. The University had been a hotbed of radical protest during the national movement under the British raj. The University's good reputation in the fields of social sciences and humanities lasted until the 1960s, when agitations by self-serving student leaders brought the academic activity to a standstill for some time.

Jatinder Sethi was born in Lyallpur, now Faislabad, in pre-Independence India. He finished his M.A. (English) from Delhi University in 1956, and went off to London to study Advertising in 1958. He passed his Membership Exam of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (M.I.P.A) in1965, and joined Rallis India in Bombay. Later, for over 20 years, he worked for the advertising agency Ogilvy &amp\; Mather. Now retired, he helps his son in his ad agency in Delhi.

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a three-part story. The second part of the story is available here (under preparation), and the third part is available here Under preparation).

Preface

This is a story of a part of our journey through life. It is a journey of a couple, from student days through five decades of life together and work, and finally a retired life.

This part will only highlight the adventure of a young, newly married couple, who travelled with hardly any money in the pocket. And landing in London without knowing a soul in that foreign land. It is more a journey through life of two people, who fell in love, without realizing or knowing what the future will unfold. Or hold. Well, "Love is blind", and we were blind. But we will not do it again.

Jatinder Sethi was born in Lyallpur, now Faislabad, in pre-Independence India. He finished his M.A. (English) from Delhi University in 1956, and went off to London to study Advertising in 1958. He passed his Membership Exam of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (M.I.P.A) in1965, and joined Rallis India in Bombay. Later, for over 20 years, he worked for the advertising agency Ogilvy &amp\; Mather. Now retired, he helps his son in his ad agency in Delhi.

Editor's note: This is the second part of a three-part story. The first part of the story is available here, and the third part is available here Under preparation). Part 1 ended with the Sethis leaving Cochin (now Kochi) on a ship for Europe.

Preface

This is a story of a part of our journey through life. It is a journey of a couple, from student days through five decades of life together and work, and finally a retired life.

The sea voyage in a lower deck

Anand has been a print and broadcast journalist in Canada. His translations of Hindi fiction into English have been published by Penguin India and Rupa Books. He has also translated Canadian fiction writers, including the 2013 Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro into Hindi. He divides his time between Montreal, Canada and Lucknow, India.

The King of Rock n Roll was a swarthy teenager who couldn’t have been over 5 feet 6 inches tall.

His claim to fame was a crest on his blue blazer that showed a guitar and curlicues that said, "King of Rock n Roll."

If you went to an English-medium (or convent) school in India in 1950s and 1960s, you'd know what kind of blazer I am talking about. These blazers with crests of schools have now become very common in India. Every school with the name of a saint (sometimes, imaginary saint) attached to it has a school dress with a blazer and a tie. The blazer is worn only in the winter, but the tie, sometimes looking like a twisted rope, is de rigueur.

No one had heard the King sing, or seen him play the guitar. No one knew if he could even play the instrument. In 1960, rock n roll had caught the fancy of teenagers in India as mainly dance music\; it was its nascent stage and the genre that we know today as rock music was yet to come.

Harish Malhotra, MD, is a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Medical School in Newark, New Jersey. He is the past chair of department of psychiatry of Overlook hospital, Summit. He has been practicing psychiatry since 1977. His book Metaphors of Healing is available from Amazon and Barnes and Nobles, including Kindle and Nook\; see below for an excerpt from this book.

Between 1953 and 1956, I lived in Aligarh, a town in Uttar Pradesh, India. My father was a manager in the Central Bank of India. As he moved to different towns in India, so did his family. It exposed me to different cultures.

As we landed in Aligarh, we heard the locals jokingly say that four things made Aligarh a remarkable place - miyan, machhar, mitti, makkhi.

Anand has been a print and broadcast journalist in Canada. His translations of Hindi fiction into English have been published by Penguin India and Rupa Books. He has also translated Canadian fiction writers, including the 2013 Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro into Hindi. He divides his time between Montreal, Canada and Lucknow, India.

Not many people listened to western pop music in the 950s and 60s in Lucknow. Those who did were either Anglo-Indians and Indian Christians, or students of the schools run by the missionaries. I was in the latter group.

I have a very clear memory as to what got me interested in western pop. It was the song Bernadine from the 1957 movie with the same name. By this time, I and some other teenagers in Lucknow had also discovered rock and roll through the hit song Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley. Its copy Lal lal gaal jaan pai he lagoo in the 1957 Hindi movie Mr. X was probably the first desi rock n roll song.

Jatinder Sethi was born in Lyallpur, now Faislabad, in pre-Independence India. He finished his M.A. (English) from Delhi University in 1956, and went off to London to study Advertising in 1958. He passed his Membership Exam of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (M.I.P.A) in1965, and joined Rallis India in Bombay. Later, for over 20 years, he worked for the advertising agency Ogilvy &amp\; Mather. Now retired, he helps his son in his ad agency in Delhi.

Editor's note: This is the third, and final, part of a three-part story. The first part of the story is available here, and the third part is available here. Part 1 ended with the Sethis leaving Cochin (now Kochi) on a ship for Europe. Part 2 ended with Mr. Sethi getting a job.

Preface

This is a story of a part of our journey through life. It is a journey of a couple, from student days through five decades of life together and work, and finally a retired life.

My wife gets a job