Page 16 - Seniors Toady - September Issue 2020

dedicated fax line. The visiting cards of those
The pleasure of listening to music on vinyl records is
making a comeback in select circles
gradually given way to calling and patching
in people into a group call over a cell phone
with numbers getting easily accessed from
the contact list or the net. I had retained a set
of the voluminous telephone directories for
quite a many years before giving them away
to the raddiwala - who well could have been
purveyors of consumer data in the past, that
is so easily sold today by the FANGs and the
likes where we socialise virtually today.
Get the fax right
My first foray into the corporate world
in early 1980s exposed me to telex and
teleprinters and fax machines. Our company,
a multinational pharmaceutical company,
was housed in a heritage building in the
heritage precincts of Ballard Pier. Business
reporting to overseas used to be done via
telex for the top-line views and the detailed
ones through snail mail. When the fax
machines came in mid-1980s, given the
high costs initially and the long lead time to
procure phone lines, the canny ones opened
shops to facilitate faxing facility by charging
per page (used to be Rs 12 to 15 per page)
and we used to send our office help over to
these shops to fax the business information
running into several pages and analyses.
Overtime, the prices levelled and almost
every company had a fax machine and the
16
days used to have the telephone, the fax and
the telex numbers as necessary information.
Several brands like Ricoh, Canon, ICIM etc.
used to proliferate those days. Like most
others, fax machines too have been webbed
out by technology.
Musically yours
Working as I was in the Fort Heritage
precincts, I used to amble down to Kala
Ghoda (the eponymous black statue of the
royalty on horse was imposing, before it was
relegated out of sight to the grounds of the
zoo in Byculla). One of the must-visits was
Rhythm House which used to sell music
records (or vinyls) - English, Hindi, Marathi,
Tamil et al. They used to have lovely cubicles
or listening rooms where you could play the
records and hear the music in solitude and
with headphones before deciding to buy - the
Curmally family (promoters) were ahead of
the times in experiential marketing, if I were
to observe. It was a delight to scour, select
and hear the the various duration and mixes
of music on LP (long play) and EP (extended
play) vinyls with RPMs (rotation per minute)
speeds of 33 & 1/3, 45 and 78. They all used
to come in cardboard sleeves with clear
descriptions and list of the music. HMV was
a famous brand of record players and vinyls
those days. Many may remember its iconic
logo of a dog listening to the record being
played (today it has morphed into Saregama,
if I am not mistaken). Overtime technology
developed and purveyed music in the form
of cassettes (does anyone remember using
a pencil to untangle or tighten the cassette
spool?) to CDs to iPods to YouTube to the
smartphones and along with it perished
memories and landmarks like the Rhythm
House. The building stands at Kala Ghoda
even today and it is a melancholic joy to see