Uttar Pradesh

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.

In 1955, when I was in the seventh grade, we lived in a town called Aligarh. It was a major town of Uttar Pradesh, seat of Aligarh Muslim University.

As I would step into the bazaar from my home, I would immediately see hawkers with their carts full of fruits. Most of them were selling bananas and guavas. They were the poor man's fruit because people could afford them. Bananas sold for six annas (one rupee = 16 annas) per dozen while guavas sold for four annas per ser (an old measure of weight, about 0.6 kg).

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.

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.

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.

My father always brought his family with him to whichever city he was assigned by his employer, Central Bank of India. When we moved from Patiala to Meerut, I was admitted in the Government High School there.

As I stepped into sixth grade, the class teacher, Mr. Mathura Prasad, took an instant liking on this "transferee." He made me the class monitor .As I was thinking about the "leadership status" that Mr. Prasad tossed me into, I think that he liked me because I was one of the better-dressed students. My father was a bank manager, and I belonged to the upper-middle class. My classmates were children of labourers, peons, or clerks. There was noticeable contrast between the quality of their clothing between mine.