Today the Yellow
legal pad is well known and widely used all over the world,by lawyers, artists and in fact by all. The origin of which by itself is
interesting and can be googled.
My introduction to
the Yellow sheets of paper was as a very young boy when I saw reams of it
being used by my maternal uncle for his studies. This yellow paper which I
later came to know came out of the packing for the x-ray films which were
imported for the radiology dept in the Christian medical college – CMC hospital
as it was & is famously known .It was the Go -To hospital in the country in
the early 60’s.
The hospital
itself is in a town named Vellore . The town is about a 100 plus km away from
the metro city Madras ( now Chennai) in the southern state of Tamilnadu. The
joke about the town was that it had a
fort and everyone called it a fort
without a king, and in that a temple without a God and a moat without
water. But then the town was famous all over the country for, was the CMC.
There were doctors
from abroad and from all over India in CMC. The medical college itself was
easily the best and it was a given that if you got an admission, your medical
career was assured and would progress to the very top.
Surprisingly enough
all the three of my maternal uncles Edward, Galen, & Shepherd ( the names
were probably after the Edward the King/ Galen after the physician & surgeon in the Roman empire
& of course Shepherd after the Psalm23 ) were working in the CMC
hospital.Edward in Adminstration, Galen in Pathology Lab& Shepherd in
Radiology but then it may have been because my grandfather Mr. Gangadharan used to be the Superintendent
of the water works in Vellore and he probably had a lot of influence in the CMC
hospital.
I never knew my
grandfather much, but whatever I remember of him was in a white shirt tucked
into a khaki half pant, a stockinged feet, brown shoes and a Sola Topee. This
was the British era dress in the India in those days.And yes! He had a hobby of
repairing watches.
I have distinct memories of seeing him hunched over a watch
with the magnifying eyeglass closely poring over a watch under a table light. I
now realise the hobby would have required precision hand movements. I also
vividly recall the pinch he would give with his grown thumbnail when at times I
would enquiringly touch an open watch at the table. Another favorite of his was
his pet dog Lassie, which died exactly after a year his master passed away.
The house itself
was a of a typical design of the older times,in that town, with a huge thick
door like a temple door with a small corridor leading into the house with an
atrium courtyard and the corridor
moving directly out on to a open garden area at the end. Just before the garden
area was a well and directly opposite was the kitchen where wood was used for
the cooking. If I remember right there were about four rooms altogether in the
house.
Now coming back to
the yellow paper. It was Shepherd uncle who was working in the radiology dept
in CMC ,who would bring the yellow paper (which would have been thrown out)from
his dept and used them for practising maths .He would burn the midnight oil, I learnt later that he was studying for his
higher degree reams of these papers filled with mathematical notations.
Inspite of all
this ,It was he who introduced me to the classic movies like Ten Commandments,
Ben Hur, Samson & Delilah. He would take me to these movies to Dinakaran theatre which screened only English
movies,and in the interval, treat me to mutton pokaras which was sold outside
the gates of the theatre ,and handed over through the gaps in the iron gates. Surprisingly,inspite
of decades, the taste lingers in my mind and I don’t think I have eaten such pokaras to date.Sometimes after a tiring bout of studying in the late evenings, he would treat me to a glass of masala milk. I
remember seeing big vats of boiling milk in the shop, to which some flavours
were added and the guy would give steaming glasses of milk , topped by
cream.It was delicious.
Time passed and I
left Vellore with my father a Naval
Office who was posted in other cities. I lost touch with Shepherd uncle directly for quite sometime and it was much much later ,I came to know that he had completed his
Msc degree in Madurai, and later did a stint in Australia before he pushed off to the
US the details of which I do not know.
During this time I
had been through College , joined the army, and opted out of army to start a
life in the private sector. It was after years of humongus effort put in ( akin
to the movie In” Pursuit of Happiness”) to make a mark in the career I chose,
did I learn to appreciate the effort which Shepherd uncle would have put in to
make the journey from a small town in South India against all odds to the USA
and to get a Phd there and do yeoman service in hospitals there and settle there, and giving his sons the opportunity, for which he has had to struggle for.
In my mind the yellow paper became the symbol of the
struggle,& success for him to break through a level of mediocratic existence
to a path of dynamic growth.
