Finding the Founder

Almost 18 months ago a few of us Old Georgians located in three continents set about to try and dig up more information on the Founding Principal of our old school in the mountains of South India! The people who led the charge were John Castellas in Melbourne, Monty Shroff in London, Bryan Mulley in Leicester, Brian McDonald in Coimbatore and a few others. We could find huge amounts of info on the man and his work, his movements in and out of India, his speeches from the pulpit and at fund raising events in India and the UK and so much more - why, John C even managed to locate and buy two copies of a book written by the good Reverend - one of those copies actually signed in his own hand is now in the School Archive! Over the months John and I realised that the Reverend must actually have been a reclusive sort, who shunned publicity and actually stayed out of pictures. The nearest we got was to a long shot picture (1914) of Lord Pentland , Governor of Madras Presidency the first sod at the foundation laying ceremony of the old school in Kodaikanal! There was a man of the cloth in the picture but his face was hardly recognisable! We plodded on, trawling through the internet and going after any lead we could get, we were told that the United Theological College in Bangalore kept detailed records of Missionaries who served in India - last July we checked the place out but only managed to find lots of material written by JB - no photos again! Last week John C was at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Archive where he finally came upon a group picture featuring Missionary Lecturers at the Richmond Exhibition, July 20 1907 - mercifully the picture was captioned and the Reverend's name was clearly visible. From that picture John zoomed-in and got a better look at the man and sent it out to me. Some months ago I had made a visit to the Egmore Wesley Church founded by Rev John Breeden in 1905 with the idea of trying to search its archives for a picture of the Reverend - they actually had 12 portraits of Englishman Pastors of the church but none was captioned so nobody knew who was who! One of the minions of the church actually told me to go ahead and chose any one of the pictures and caption it as that of JB!! 'Who is to know' is what he asked me in Tamil!!! Well, now that John C had obtained an image of the Reverend I went back to those 12 portraits and could very quickly identify the portrait of our man!! Here it is - the Founding Principal of the St. Georges Homes , my old school!

Ominous signs for Inglish!!

Driving to work this morning I saw this catchy advertisement on one of Chennai's bus shelters, of two girls cuddling a nice looking guy with a large tattoo on his arm with the alphabet S emblazoned on his arm and the caption read 'Seema = S = Sheila' - I didn't quite get it so I scanned the ad for more info and there it was the message - 'Now SMS on a diet, pay per character'!! This was from Docomo the Japanese GSM player who have tied up with Tata Indicom to offer GSM services in India.

Even without these inducements we have a hard time trying to figure out the SMS lingo (technical term is textese!) of kids and some adults but now with a 'pay per character' option in the pipeline me thinks texting is going to get awfully cryptic!! You may well need to carry along a SMS dictionary to figure out some of those incredibly cryptic messages that land on your mobile in future!! Hang on a tick, I just discovered a site which provides exactly this service - www.smsdictionary.co.uk!!!






Indian English, or Inglish, will never be the same again! Don't know whether to cry or smile at this prospect!!!

Hats off to these good people

Was away over the weekend in Kerala - Sudha's brother was opening a new wing at his eye hospital in Kochi so we had to be around! Sudha ofcourse, had gone on earlier as she was required to be at hand at the betrothal of a niece of mine in Trivandrum. So lots of traveling has been happening and as a consequence lots of mails to catch up with!!

I have to recount the details of an interesting thing that happened to me enroute to Kochi. I usually take out all the stuff in my pockets and put it in my pillowcase before I retire for the night on the train. Its an overnight journey from here to Kochi. So as usual I took out my wallet, my credit card wallet , pen, mobile and other little knick knacks and put them into the pillowcase and hit the sack. I woke up next morning and took out all the stuff from my pillowcase and put it right back in the respective pockets and waited for the destination station - when it did, I grabbed my backpack and a little shopping bag and got off the train and headed home for breakfast. After lunch I receive a call from a strange number on my mobile phone asking me if I had lost anything on the train! I said 'I don't think so' and the voice at the other end asked me if my credit card wallet was with me - that was when it struck me that it was missing!! All my cards were in that one wallet as was my ATM access card and a few airline frequent flyer cards and my driving licence!! I almost froze thinking of the enormous damage that could have happened if indeed the wallet was lost! The voice at the other end of the line turned out to be that of an Inspector in the Railway Protection Force (RPF) that travels on the trains these days. The cleaners at the destination station had found the wallet and handed it over to the RPF Inspector who found my visiting cards in the wallet and made that call!! He soon verified that it was indeed my wallet and asked that I send somebody to Trivandrum Central to collect the wallet! By mid day the next day I had my cards back with me!! Don't know how to thank the folks who arranged all this and am so glad that inspite of all the cynicism that surrounds us, honesty is still something we can find around us.