Devangshu Datta: The real benefits of globalisation

VIEWPOINT

In my time, the production of Ye Olde School Magazine was a complicated business. Submissions hand-written on ruled paper were sifted by the editorial board, which was composed entirely of students. Text was transcribed on the school typewriter; an enormous machine weighing many kilos.

The mag was cyclostyled, which meant the removal of ribbons and the insertion of waxed sheets into the typewriter. Waxed paper and ribbons trailed in all directions during the process. The cyclostyling saw ink squirting everywhere as the mimeograph churned out smudged pages. The sheets were stapled together, (usually in the wrong order) and sold at 50 paise a copy. Bylines were prized in this popular periodical. Given the logistics, there were no graphic elements, apart from the odd diagram composed from alphabets.

The edit board mostly consisted of high-minded boys concerned about life, the universe and everything. The words of oracles such as Ayn Rand, Ken Kesey, Khushwant Singh and Sunanda Datta-Ray were referenced, along with reviews of Abdul Karim Khan's musical prowess and learned commentary on Bankim's ideals. There were descriptions of holidays, movies and school matches, including one epic when the hockey team got into trouble after a jock called the ref a "pansy".

The magazine was produced on the students' own time""the proceeds were by and large ploughed back, though there was a little money made through over-invoicing. The killer app was that students received unsupervised access to the typewriter, mimeograph, paper, etc.

Some members of the edit board used that access to produce an unofficial magazine. This piggy-backed the production logistics but the distribution was underground. It had no name, no bylines. It was called "HH". The second H stood for "Heaven" and the first for that thing you find on the back of camels.

HH featured schoolboy fantasy sexual encounters""in hindsight, it is just as well that there were no means of introducing visual elements! It retailed at Rs 5, which would translate into the equivalent of Rs 150 in 2006-money. It was an early introduction to the high margins of the erotica industry.

Most of the fantasies were as vanilla as you could expect from teenaged virgins living in a sexually repressed, segregated, insular atmosphere. No donkeys or metrosexuals populated our fevered imaginations""it was decades before "metrosexual" was even coined. Most of us could not have spelled "clitoris" let alone found one.

Many contributors wanted to dance around the trees with the hotties of that era (Zeenie-baby, Bindu, Helen and Parveen Babi). One sophisticate wanted to visit the races with Linda Lovelace after the Illustrated Weekly depicted the porn-star wearing a see-through blouse at Ascot. One daring soul confessed to a passion for his "Aunty Natasha in Ludhiana". Someone else yearned for his next-door neighbour, (who he called "Jharna-didi"), to appease his (probably unrequited) lust.

So much has changed. Technology has rendered mimeographs and typewriters redundant. All that's necessary to put together a more explicit, high-quality HH 2.0 is a good cam-phone, a PC and a laser printer. You can even offer pdf downloads and cut dead trees out of the process. I'm sure that some bright spark is already doing that on Orkut.

Our ethos has become far less insular. I recently acquired a laptop second-hand from a kid. The seller winked and said "Lots of music on the hard drive!" as he handed it over. Indeed there was music (along with spyware and viruses galore). Amazingly, there was Abdul Karim and Nusrat as well as old filmi-geet. There was also a directory labelled "nice" and that contained a mix-and-match effort that brought home the social changes wrought by globalisation.

Somebody had merged porn video sub-titled in Cyrillic with a sound-track of robust Bhangra renditions. He had taken care to synch the sound-track and action. The Indian schoolboy of 2006 is comfortable fixating on Aunty Natasha from St Petersburg, so long as Rabbi Shergill's on the soundtrack. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" no longer needs translation.