A man before his time

Col DS Cheema (Retd)

THIS piece is a tribute to the innate genius of an unsung hero of science and relates to the period when there was no need for the government to make special efforts to develop scientific temper among students. The subject was a craze with parents and students alike, unlike the present-day when humanities has taken the lead. A man in his mid-40s roamed about on his bicycle, loaded with bags of different sizes, demonstrating science experiments in schools. The man, who earned his livelihood by doing so, was affectionately called Hans Raj ‘Wireless’. 

In 1958, when I was a student of class X in a small town, our science teacher informed us about his programme in the auditorium of the local college, within walking distance of school. The auditorium was filled with students of classes IX and X from three schools of the town. All were curious. A teacher came up on the stage and asked everyone to keep quiet. In no time, there was almost complete silence. The level of discipline among students then was such that no one dared go against the instructions of teachers. 

We were introduced to a small, smiling man who waved both hands. In a few minutes, the equipment was set up with the help of some students. He had created a makeshift ‘room’ by hanging a dirty, unironed sheet on a rope and demonstrated how a light bulb would switch on and off when he moved in or out. Next, he showed us how water would automatically flow when he put hands under a rusty iron tap, crudely fixed in a cement basin, and how it would stop when the hands were moved away. The two demonstrations were enough to mesmerise us boys and girls from a semi-rural background. We clapped again and again when the bulb went on or off, or when the water flowed out of the tap or stopped flowing. 

He got maximum applause for an automatic shoe-polishing machine. He asked a student wearing leather shoes to put his foot in the wooden box. Just then, the sound of a motor was heard for some time and then it stopped. He asked the boy to remove his foot and the shoe had been polished. To our amusement, the boy struggled as the foot wouldn’t get free and the box moved up and down. Someone in the audience was asked to give him a chawanni, which he put in a special slot, and lo and behold, the foot came out without any effort! 

There must be many villages even today, where such demonstrations will be treated as miracles. It is difficult to understand why even with hundreds of national-level science laboratories and institutions of technical excellence, such useful gadgets have not been commercialised for use by the common man, when the prototypes could be demonstrated over 50 years ago. Perhaps bureaucrats and technocrats have failed to maintain a fine balance between basic and applied research.