T. Narasipur

Growing up in Princely Mysore

Author: 
Bapu Satyanarayana

Category:

Bapu Satyanarayana, born 1932 in Bangalore, retired as Chief Engineer, Ministry of Surface Transport. At present, he is the presiding arbitrator of the Dispute Adjudication Board appointed by the National Highway Authority of India. He lives in Mysore, and enjoys writing for various newspapers and magazines on a variety of subjects, including political and civic issues.

T. Narasipur

In 1939, when I was around seven years old, my father was the manager of Mysore Silk Filatures, and posted at T. Narasipur, a small town in what was then the Princely State of Mysore. I was studying in a primary school.

T. Narasipur was a place where the rivers Cauvery and Kapila joined. It was considered as the Sangam (confluence) of three rivers including the legendary invisible Spatica Sarovara, just like the Triveni Sangam of three rivers Ganga, Yamuna and underground stream Saraswathi at Allahabad. At Allahabad, the Kumbh mela festival is observed once in 12 years, with lakhs of people taking a ceremonial bath on the auspicious day. No such ritual was observed at Sangam in T. Narasipur till recently. What I remember about two rivers is that while the Cauvery was sparkling, at the place where Kapila joined we could see a clear line of demarcation and, in comparison, the Kapila's waters were darkish.

My Early Years - 1

Author: 
T.S. Nagarajan

Category:

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.

Editor's note: This story is reproduced, with permission, from Mr. Nagarajan's second not-for-sale book of his memories, Self-Portrait: The Story of My life, 2012. This website has several excerpts from his first not-for-sale book A Pearl of Water on a Lotus Leaf &amp\; Other Memories, 2010.This story is the first of three sequential stories about his early years.

Preface

I was born before penicillin, television, Xerox and contact lenses. There were no credit cards, laser beams or ball-point pens. We had never heard of FM radios, tape decks and electric typewriters.

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