When my mother gifted me the house in Santiniketan, what came along with it, besides some furniture, was a telephone directory produced by a public sector telephone company. Even 12 years ago, when I shifted to Santiniketan, it was pretty useful. Most people still used their landline and despite the fact that the directory was dated, it seemed to throw up the correct contact details more often than not.
Over the last decade, of course, the ratio of landline users to mobile users has changed dramatically. And knowing that their customer base was shrinking, the company stopped publishing the directory. As a result, queries about some shops, the availability of particular products have to be made physically.
Meanwhile, the number of cars, motorbikes and rickshaws plying on Santiniketan's one and only arterial road has increased exponentially. Bolpur, the town adjacent to the university town of Santiniketan, is where all the shops are and accessing that area has become a nightmare.
Having suffered many a rough ride into Bolpur, my partner and I decided to create a directory of all commercial establishments in Bolpur and Santiniketan. Our methodology was simple. We hired a guy (from the many boys who belong to poor families and come looking for work) to go from shop to shop and collect details such as the name of the establishment, owner, nature of business and telephone number. We designed a form to that effect and sent him off. We then asked him to save all the collected information on an Excel sheet.
Knowing that the column "nature of business" might prove tricky for a graduate from these areas (a trifle challenged in English) we asked him to feed the data in whichever way he could. In any case, we would clean up the data when we converted it into a yellow-pages format. But we told him to be particular about collecting a card or a page from the shopkeepers' bill-book, so that we could cross-check the details later.
We had no idea that the modest sum we were paying him would get us not only data, but a lot of entertainment. Each day's entries would throw up gems and often give rise to dilemmas. One such was "Veriaty Stores". It seemed like an obvious spelling mistake. But before changing it we asked our employee to pull out the card that the proprietor had handed over to him. The card had the same spelling. So, we had to take a policy decision. Do we correct it or be true to the original?
A few days later, another entry under "nature of business" was "shu soff". But that was an easy one - "shoe shop". This also taught him how to spell "shop," which helped in other entries. The next one was "soil jewelry". It took us a while to figure that he meant terracotta jewellery sold by one of the handicraft shops.
Slowly, he got better. But I must admit, the boring job of cleaning the data was made entertaining by these gaffes. We soon hit upon another classic - "foot soff". The second word had already been decoded but what was a foot shop? The shop had no card. Apparently, the owner had written the name of his shop on a piece of paper. It was written in Bengali and phonetically read "die foot shop". That's when the penny dropped. Dry fruit shop!
We are almost done with the cleaning-up process and are thinking about printing the data on paper or saving it on a CD. But we shall truly treasure the original.
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