Life Back Then

Independence (?) of the Reserve Bank of India

Author: 
R C Mody

Category:

R C Mody

R C Mody is a postgraduate in Economics and a Certificated Associate of the Indian Institute of Bankers. He studied at Raj Rishi College (Alwar), Agra College (Agra), and Forman Christian College (Lahore). For over 35 years, he worked for the Reserve Bank of India, where he headed several all-India departments, and was also the Principal of the RBI Staff College. Now (2013) 86 years old, he is engaged in social work, reading, writing, and travelling. He lives in New Delhi with his wife. His email address is rameshcmody@gmail.com.

Editor’s Note: Mr. Mody is a prolific contributor to this website. He has written a number of articles about pre-Independence India, and is now beginning to provide post-Independence articles. He worked with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for over 35 years. We look forward to further contributions from him about the RBI after Independence.

A favour for a spoilt kid

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

Category:

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

In 1955, as a fourteen-year old, I was thrilled at the prospect of going to Bombay (now Mumbai) on a school-sponsored trip.

I was excited by the prospect of travelling almost a thousand miles from Amritsar, a small town in north India, to the glamour of Bombay, the movie capital of India. There were legions of stories of how actors and actresses had been discovered after arriving penniless in Bombay.

So it was natural for me to brag about it to my friends and other people in the neighbourhood.

Chaman Lal's mother heard about my planned trip. She talked to my mother because she had an interest in Delhi, which was on the route to Bombay.

Science and Cricket at Agra College

Author: 
Ashok Sarkar

Category:

Ashok Sarkar (born 1929) retired as an Air Commodore from the Indian Air Force. He was awarded the Vishisht Seva Medal (VSM) by the Indian government. His career included commanding a number of Air Force field units, and a diplomatic posting at the Indian Embassy in Moscow during the 1960s. He was an outstanding student and sportsman in his youth, and after his retirement, he was an inspiration for young sports talent in Agra, his hometown. He continues to run a play-school for young children, a labour of love he founded with his late wife, Chitra, and enjoys a quiet life nurturing the prize-winning flower garden at his ancestral home in Agra.

I was a student in Agra College, Agra over 1944-50. At that time, Agra College was one of India’s leading educational institutions.

Agra College was established in 1823 by Gangadhar Shastri, a noted Sanskrit scholar of his time. In the beginning, the College had two large hostels, namely, Hewett and Thompson. Agra College soon attracted students from many parts of India. A number of communities came forward to build hostels for students of their own community, such as Bhargava Hostel, Chaubey Hostel, Kayastha Hostel, and Vaish Boarding House. Each hostel had a cemented tennis court, apart from volleyball and basketball courts, as well as a large recreation hall, where functions were held from time to time.

Summer Holiday in Chail (night in jail) and Simla

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

Category:

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

At long last, we had passed our final MBBS exams. After five years and many upheavals in our young lives, we were done with the grind.

After another six months of an easy internship without pay, we would get our medical degrees at the end of 1964. And then, we would be on our way to glorious careers in medicine! That is the way it looked to me in early 1964 at the age of twenty two.

Jitinder, one of my friends, suggested that four of us friends could go on a holiday\; he would be able to get his family car for the journey. Others were equally enthusiastic ­- of course, no other family had a car! We agreed to gather in Ludhiana at Jitinder's home, and go from there to Simla.

Memories of Muktsar: 1942

Author: 
Joginder Anand

Category:

Dr. Anand - an unholy person born in 1932 in the holy town of Nankana Sahib, central Punjab. A lawyer father, a doctor mother. Peripatetic childhood - almost gypsy style. Many schools. Many friends, ranging from a cobbler's son (poorly shod as the proverb goes) to a judge's son. MB From Glancy (now Government) Medical College Amritsar, 1958. Comet 4 to Heathrow, 1960.

Long retired. Widower. A son and a daughter, their spouses, five grandchildren, two hens (impartially, one black, one white) keeping an eye on me as I stand still and the world goes by.

 

1942. A little town called Muktsar, located in what was Ferozepur district at that time (now in Sri Muktsar Sahib district, created by splitting Ferozepur). In the Punjab, not far from today's Pakistan.

My mother was posted as a doctor in the government hospital in Muktsar - the only woman doctor for miles and miles. A slow train would pass through countryside, where wind would whip up sandstorms, and whirl up and move sand hillocks. Sometimes the sand, suspended in the atmosphere, would leave the sun shooting its rays in to the sand, producing intense heat but not too much light.

My father was a lawyer, practising in Shahdara, near Lahore, at that time. Instead of dismantling his practice there and starting from scratch in Muktsar, he maintained a flat in Lahore, and travelled down to Muktsar for the weekend.

Memories of 1940s Campbellpore

Author: 
Joginder Anand

Category:

Dr. Anand - an unholy person born in 1932 in the holy town of Nankana Sahib, central Punjab. A lawyer father, a doctor mother. Peripatetic childhood - almost gypsy style. Many schools. Many friends, ranging from a cobbler's son (poorly shod as the proverb goes) to a judge's son. MB From Glancy (now Government) Medical College Amritsar, 1958. Comet 4 to Heathrow, 1960.

Long retired. Widower. A son and a daughter, their spouses, five grandchildren, two hens (impartially, one black, one white) keeping an eye on me as I stand still and the world goes by.

 

In Campbellpore, now vanished from the maps! (Ed. Renamed as Attock by Pakistan).

In 1942, my mother, tired of seeing my father's difficult journey from Lahore, where he worked as a lawyer, to Muktsar, where she was posted as a doctor, requested the Government to transfer her to a nearer 'station' (the term then used in government service for postings).

However, the Inspector General of Hospitals, Punjab, decided to send her to Campbellpore - more than 400 kilometres from Lahore. The rationale was that instead of two or three changes of train from Lahore to Muktsar, my father could travel straight from Lahore to Campbellpore by Frontier Mail. A ten-hour journey. Then, a tonga ride to our hospital house.

Pindi Memoirs by a Sikh Son of the Soil -1

Author: 
Kanwarjit Singh Malik

Category:

Kanwarjit Singh Malik was born in Rawalpindi in 1930. His family moved to India at the time of Partition in 1947. He joined the Flying Club in Jalandhar, and was later selected by the Indian Air Force. After the retirement from the Air Force, he served as a senior captain in Air India and Air Lanka.

Editor's note: This is a slightly edited version of an article that originally appeared at http://nativepakistan.com/pindi-memoirs-by-a-sikh-son-of-the-soil-part-1-rawalpindi-blog/, and is reproduced here with the author's permission. Part 2 is available here.

I have recently read 19 episodes of "My Old but Ever New Pindi", a series of "Nostalgic Articles about Rawalpindi" written by Rafique Khan Sahib, in the website Native Pakistan. Being a native of Pindi, these articles took me back to the good old days. Today, sitting in Foster City, near San Francisco, USA, at the home of my daughter, I remember Pindi as it was in my mind as I remember.

Pindi Memoirs by a Sikh Son of the Soil -2

Author: 
Kanwarjit Singh Malik

Category:

Kanwarjit Singh Malik was born in Rawalpindi in 1930. His family moved to India at the time of Partition in 1947. He joined the Flying Club in Jalandhar, and was later selected by the Indian Air Force. After the retirement from the Air Force, he served as a senior captain in Air India and Air Lanka. He got married in 1961, and now lives in Mumbai with his wife.

Editor's note: This is a slightly edited version of an article that originally appeared at http://nativepakistan.com/pindi-memoirs-by-a-sikh-son-of-the-soil-part-2-rawalpindi-blog/, and is reproduced here with the author's permission. Part 1 is available here.

The details in this article are as told to me by my eldest brother Bhupinder Singh Malik, and my father Malik Mukhbain Singh, Bar-at-law.

My Challenging, Fruitful M.A. in Economic and Public Administration

Author: 
P C Mathur

Category:

Prakash, nicknamed ‘Titi’ by his dadi and called ‘PC’ by his friends was born in Alwar, a constituent Princely State of the Rajputana Agency since 1832, on June 1, 1940 in  diasporic family of civil service Kayasthas drenched in the Mughal-Muslim culture of Old Delhi. He is a University of Rajasthan faculty pensioner with a continuing passion for academic activity ‘To see Rajasthan better, To make Rajasthan better.’ He lives in Jaipur with his wife Shashi, and his daughter Sfoorti works in Gurgaon.

Getting there

When I was young, my father, a civil servant, was often transferred from one town to another in Rajasthan.

In 1953, when I was in Class 8, I took a State-level Board examination, and scored very good marks. Before this, I had studied in three different schools in three different towns (Alwar, Bharatpur and Jhalawar). I had two separate stints in the Happy School located at Alwar. This school still occupies a soft corner in my web of memories because it was a pioneer in adopting the world-famous Montessori method of teaching young children. More importantly, it provided a green ambience with plenty of trees to climb whose height was not a deterrent and their branches were low and strong enough to bear the weight of young primary-class students.

Pindi Memoirs by a Sikh Son of the Soil -3

Author: 
Kanwarjit Singh Malik

Category:

Kanwarjit Singh Malik was born in Rawalpindi in 1930. His family moved to India at the time of Partition in 1947. He joined the Flying Club in Jalandhar, and was later selected by the Indian Air Force. After the retirement from the Air Force, he served as a senior captain in Air India and Air Lanka. He got married in 1961, In 2011, when they were living in Chandigarh, his wife fell ill, and passed away in spite of the best available medical aid. Then, his daughters, who live in Dubai, California and Hong Kong, requested him to move back to his old flat in Mumbai, as it was easier for them to visit him there. He has started writing a book titled From Khyber to Kanyakumari and Beyond, which will be about his work experiences and tourist experiences in various countries.

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