LOOKING BACK: INDIA IN OBJECTS
1. THE TRACTOR A REVOLUTION ON WHEELS:-
Think of the Punjabi farmer and there’s bound to be a tractor in your frame, jauntily jolting through mustard fields. This image came about during the green revolution of the 1960s. By the 1950s, a newly independent and essentially starving nation began receiving tractors as gifts and subsidies from the two Cold War superpowers seeking a footprint in the region the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1961, India was already better-fed and was making its own tractors-for example, TAFE in Chennai escorts in Haryana and Mahindra & Mahindra.
2. PARLE- G BISCUITS - THE FIRST PACKAGED SNACK
The house of Parle was set up by Mohan Lal Dayal in Mumbai’s suburb of vile Parle in 1928, and their first product was actually orange candy. The first Parle glucose biscuit was baked in 1938. In fact, until the factory shut in 2016, the Vile Parle area always carried the aroma of freshly baked biscuits.
3.THE MOBILE PHONE
The cell phone has come a long way since that first call in India- ‘between union telecom minister Sukh Ram and West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu’, in 1995. Back in 1998, it cost 16 rupees a minute to make a call. The handsets were so large and heavy; they could have been used as weapons. It would be a few years before ‘mobiles’ became affordable for private use. By 1999, though, there were enough early adopters for the film Haseena Maan Jayegi to include a song titled ’what is mobile number’.
4.HMT WATCH - REMEMBER THE TIME
Dependable, durable, and affordable, HMT watches were called the first timekeepers of India. Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT), a public sector undertaking, began manufacturing wristwatches at the behest of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who dreamed of bringing a sense of time-consciousness to the famously tardy Indian.
The company set up its first watch manufacturing unit in Bangalore in 1961, in collaboration with Japanese citizens. For nearly a quarter of a century, HMT dominated the market-switching from hand-wound to automatic day-date in the ’70s, followed by super-accurate quartz and ana-Digi models.
An HMT watch was something you warned or saved up for and wore with pride. The most popular models had to be booked months in advance and were passed down the generation, still ticking. The brand’s dominance lasted until the launch of Tata’s Titan in 1984; a decade later, liberalization further dented its share. The government shut the loss-making venture in 2016.
5. BATA SHOES - NO-NONSENSE STURDINESS
For most of us, a new academic year meant crisply ironed uniforms, textbooks covered in brown papers, and a new pair of Bata shoes! The brand was so embedded in the life of the middle-class family that most people assumed the Swiss company was Indian. The Bata Shoe Company was India's arm was set up as a small operation in Konnagar, near Calcutta, in 1932, an area that would eventually grow into an industrial town called Batanagar. Bata now has a retail network of over 1,200 stores. Its low-cost rubber slippers, launched under the brand name Hawai in 1950, were so popular that Hawai became synonymous with flip-flops. Today the brand has started wooing hip teens.
6. THE DOORDARSHAN LOGO - WHEN TV BEGAN
Until 1975, Indians had been a radio-listening public; people of only seven Indian cities had sat before a television. Devashis Bhattacharyya, a young NID student, made the symbol for the country’s public broadcaster, Doordarshan, a communication system that shook the country. Bhattacharyya’s scribble, beginning with the human eye, was part of a classroom exercise. He drew two curves around it, depicting, as he says, the yin and the yang. Of the 14 designs submitted, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi picked his. The DD signature tune had already been composed by Pandit Ravi Shankar, a key figure in the AIR orchestra, along with shehnai artiste Ustad Ali Ahmed Hussain Khan. The whole package- the symbol and the tune-appeared for the first time on television screens on April 1, 1976.
7. BOARD EXAM MARKSHEET - SCORED FOR LIFE
The class 10 and 12 Board exam mark sheet, every worried student’s ticket to higher education, has a long history. The Central Board of Secondary Education came into being in 1952. In 1979, the Board introduced the 10+2 system. The first Board exam called the All India and Delhi Senior School Certificate examination, was held in 1979, and students were awarded mark sheets under the new system.
8. TYPEWRITER - THE ORIGINAL QWERTY KEYBOARD
The clicking and clanging of a typewriter was once the omnipresent background sound in offices all over the country. Godrej & Boyce began making the device in India in the 1950s but it had been part of the landscape since the late 19th century, imported from British and the US Typewriters replaced clerks writing in longhand.
The sight of the pavement typist, banging out affidavits and other legal documents often under the shade of a tree, is an emblematic image of Indian Streetlife, Typewriters became tools of empowerment for women in cities, who went to typing schools and got jobs as secretaries and typists. In countless films over the years, from the 1955 Mr. and Mrs. 55 to the 1974 art-house offering 27 Down, women are shown working on typewriters. With the coming if the computer, typewriters faded away. In 2011, Godrej & Boyce produced its last typewriter in India. But the humble machine left its mark-the Qwerty keyboard, which was invented with the typewriter.
9. EVMs - THE VOTE CATCHER
Before 1999, when electronic voting machines or EVMs were used in state and general elections, ballot papers were used to cast votes. The Election Commission mooted the idea of the EVM in 1977. In 1979, the Electronics Corporation of India developed a prototype. It was introduced at 50 polling stations in a by-election in Kerala in 1982. The use of ballot papers was time-consuming, given to malpractices like booth-capturing and ballot-box stuffing, not to mention the prolonged counting drills. The EVMs reflect the multiple changes India’s voting system has seen.
10. MARUTI 800 - THE PEOPLE CAR
In January 2014, when newspapers reported that the Maruti 800, India’s first people’s car, had become history, thousands of cars were closed to former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay Gandhi. After his death, Indira Gandhi revived the concept in partnership with Suzuki. The target customers were two-wheeler owners looking for affordable cars. In 1983, Indira Gandhi handed over the keys of the first Maruti 800 to New Delhi-based Harpal Singh, who had won the ownership rights through a lucky draw. The Maruti 800 remained India’s best-selling car till 2004.
11. AMBASSADOR - THE POWER VEHICLE
Hindustan Motors started the production of the Ambassador in 1957 based on the British Morris Oxford Series III car. The Ambassador was the original Indian car-to-own one in the 1960s and ‘70s was a symbol of one’s status and affluence. And though in later years, it came to be primarily used for taxis, it was the vehicle of choice for government babus till well into the 2000s. The white Ambassador with the red beacon on the top spelt authority as nothing else did. Hindustan Motors stopped the production of the Ambassador in 2014 and in February 2017 sold the Ambassador brand to the French company Peugeot.
12. THE ISRO SATELLITE LAUNCH VEHICLE - SPACE SAGA
After ISRO launched its Mars Orbiter Mission in 2013, the NYT in 2014 published a cartoon which showed a dhoti-clad Indian, cow in tow, knocking at the door of a room that had ‘elite space club’ written on it. But Indians had a chance to hit back when in 2017 ISRO launched 104 satellites from a single rocket. But ISRO has been making India proud for years, right from the time in July 1980 when it successfully operated the first Indian satellite launch vehicle –the SLV-3- from Sriharikota, which put the Rohini satellite (RS-1) in orbit. That launch put India into an exclusive club of a handful of countries that could indigenously develop the technology to launch satellites into space. The credit went to a man, a scientist at ISRO, who was to become the president of the country later- APJ Abdul Kalam.
13. POST BOX/INLAND LETTER - MAIL-DOMINATED WORLD
How many of us remember covering all the sides of a blue inland letter with our scribbles, and then using even the flaps in the side (meant to close and glue the latter), while writing to friends and families? Introduced in October 1950, the inland letter kept Indians connected before STD, emails, mobile phones, WhatsApp and Skype took over. It was the carrier of a good news-a child being born, a new job, an impending visit by a loved one-and of grief-death, sickness…
For children, the most exciting part of the whole ritual was posting the letters-putting their hands inside the red post box and letting the letter drop. The postman with his bag of letters was eagerly awaited, and in parts of rural India, often even helped people write them.
14.THE LPG CYLINDER - FIRE OF LIFE
India’s LPG story goes back to 1955 when Burmah Shell began marketing the liquefied gas in Mumbai. Rural India had reservations. Many believed it was not healthy to cook using gas. But the ease and cleanliness it offered caught on. India is now the third-largest consumer of domestic LPG after the US and China. More than 9 crore Indian families have LPG connections.
15. FLOPPY DISKS - TEMPERAMENTAL OBJECTS
The early PCs had these slots for a disk to go in… this was before the CD drawers, in the time of the clunky and nightmarishly unreliable floppy disk. It was the early 1980s. A college project could take weeks to finish because you had to get everyone off the landline and dial-up to use the internet. After you got your information, you formatted it (oh, the simple joys of Paint and PowerPoint), and saved it carefully on this floppy disk. Then you prayed. Because there was about a 50% chance that at some point in the following weeks, if not immediately, the disk would refuse to talk to your computer.
There were scores of possible reasons- you dropped it; it got a bit damp; you moved it about too much; you’d had it too long. The USB thumb drives of the 1990s came as a welcome relief; today you can just store everything on your phone. As for the floppy, it survives only as the universal symbol for ‘Save’.
16. THE PASSBOOK - LITTLE BLUE BOOKLET
Did you know that before the First World War, there was no practice of issuing passports in India? In 1914, the government enacted the Defence of India Act, which made it compulsory to possess a passport for travel from and into India. The aim was to bring the Indian practice in line with other parts of the British Empire and other countries. Originally, state governments had the power to issue passports. Subsequently, this became a central subject. Today, about 5.15% of India’s population has a valid passport.
17. SIM REFILL - TOP-UP TALK TIME
Back in the 1990s, with the cell phone boom came a plethora of palm-sized scratch cards that you could use to buy talk time for your handset. For as little as Rs-10, you could also top up your card, in case you’d gone overboard with the chatting (remember, incoming was chargeable too, in the beginning). The pay-as-you-go model helped make cell phone services accessible to youngsters, students, and large rural populations.
Even in a day of Smartphone apps and data usage, prepaid connections remain vastly more popular. India’s telecom regulator, TRAI, estimates that over 95% of India’s cell phone subscribers remain prepaid users. Responding to that demand, telecoms continue to offer competitively priced prepaid packs. Plus, you no longer have to go to the corner store; you can use e-wallets, debit cards, and a range of other virtual means to top up your talk time.
18. THE BICYCLE- PEDALLING IN THE WIND
You see it in the films of the 1950s and 60s a stylish Saira Banu or Asha Parekah parched on the seat, cycling to college or for picnics with girlfriends, polka-dotted scarf flying in the wind. Before cars and scooters took over the roads, you cycled.
In 1949, the Murugappa Group in collaboration with UK’s Tube Investments started TI Cycles.