Morse @ Malanjkhand

This would be in the winter of 1995 or early 1996, when I was the Product Manager for the DB2 Database product. At the time, DB2 -- along with other IBM hardware and software -- was sold and supported in India by Tata Information Systems Ltd (TISL), a joint venture between IBM and Tata Sons. IBM had been kicked out of India in 1977, alongside Coca-Cola, for failing to comply with FERA regulations. Now, nearly two decades later, the company was back -- in this new avatar. Two key people made this happen: Venky Raman and Dan Gupta. It was Venky who recruited me into TISL after I left Tata Steel, knowing I was perhaps the only person in India with deep DB2 expertise.

Though my role was national and even pan-ASEAN in scope, I worked out of the modest IBM office on Harrington Street (now Ho Chi Minh Sarani), right across from the US Consulate in Calcutta. Still, I spent most of my time traveling across India and Southeast Asia, supporting customers in a mix of technical firefighting and evangelism.

One of our early customers for IBM RISC systems -- the RS/6000 running AIX (IBM’s Unix) -- was Hindustan Copper. Alongside the hardware, they had also purchased the DB2/6000 relational database. The installations were spread across Ghatsila (Bihar, now Jharkhand), Khetri (Rajasthan), and Malanjkhand (Madhya Pradesh). Hardware and software had been shipped from IBM HQ in Bangalore and commissioned by their staff -- but nothing worked quite as expected. That’s when our team from the Calcutta office was dispatched to make things right.

Now you might wonder -- what’s the big deal? Hardware-software problem? Google the solution, or post on Stack Overflow, and someone will help. But this was 1995. The internet was a toy in the hands of a privileged few. Email was unheard of in most offices. Fax and telephone were our only means of “rapid” communication. And IBM Calcutta had neither email nor access to IBM’s global systems -- only IBM Bangalore did.

Malanjkhand, to make matters worse, had just one telephone line. One. And it was typically down about 200 days a year. Why? Well, just look at the map. Malanjkhand is about five hours by road from either Jabalpur (MP) or Nagpur (Maharashtra), nestled at the edge of the Kanha Reserve Forest -- prime tiger territory. So remote was the place that during monsoon, the bridge to town had collapsed, and IBM hardware had to be hand-carried across a flooded river -- boxes on backs -- to the installation site.

That’s where we were headed, Debanjan Mukherjee from the RS/6000 AIX team and myself from DB2/6000, tasked with making sure that COBOL programs could run using data from DB2.

The plan was simple: fly to Nagpur on Monday morning, take a beat-up Ambassador taxi to Malanjkhand, and reach by evening. Tuesday to Friday would be for solving the problem. Saturday, we’d travel to Jabalpur to catch a flight back to Calcutta. Given the remoteness, our Bangalore support team advised us to carry an “image” of a working system on tape -- a last resort in case all else failed. We backed up a full image from Canara Bank in Dalhousie Square -- yes, including all their data! Privacy wasn’t exactly a hot topic in Calcutta’s tech circles back then.

We arrived in Malanjkhand to a warm welcome from the local HCL IT team. For them, having IBM engineers visit was a badge of honour. Honestly, whether the system worked or not didn’t bother them -- manual processes still ran the show, and copper continued to flow from mine to smelter. That Monday evening, we were shown to the guest house. No work. Just rest.

Tuesday morning, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. We wiped the system and reinstalled everything from scratch. All was smooth -- until we tried to run the demo COBOL programs. And then -- disaster. An ugly error message. No problem, we thought -- check the System Maintenance Manual. And sure enough, there it was -- the error message, along with the solution: Please contact the IBM support engineer.

Which would have been helpful, except that we were the IBM support engineers. And we had no clue.

Do we restore the Canara Bank image and hope for the best? We decided to hold off on that nuclear option. Instead, we tried something else.

I copied the entire error message by hand and cycled to the radio hut, about a mile from the computer centre. From there, the message was sent in Morse code to HCL HQ in Calcutta. I had already alerted our Admin Head at IBM Calcutta to expect something. He checked in with HCL HQ regularly, and once the message was received, he dispatched a peon to collect it and fax it to IBM Bangalore -- the only office connected to the global IBM support network.

That evening, the two HCL IT Managers visited us at the guest house. I can’t recall if there was liquor, but I do remember them grilling us about our salaries, perks, and urban lifestyle. Then they gave a long speech about how their life -- with free housing, cheap food, pension, and free medical facilities -- was actually better. “You may think city life is great, but in the end, we come out ahead,” they said with quiet pride.

With no answer expected for 24 hours, Wednesday was ours. Debanjan and I went on a tiger safari at dawn -- the rising sun, the mist over the grass, deer, gaur, buffalo… and let’s imagine, for the story’s sake, that we spotted a tiger too. In the afternoon, we joined a cricket match between two HCL teams -- each of us drafted into rival sides. I don’t remember who won, but we had a great time.

Meanwhile, somewhere deep in IBM’s support channels, someone cracked our problem. By late Wednesday, the solution reached IBM Bangalore. And from there began the reverse relay: fax to IBM Calcutta, hand-carried to HCL HQ, transmitted by Morse code back to Malanjkhand, transcribed and delivered by peon to us by Thursday morning.

And yes -- the fix worked.

There was jubilation in the computer department. The IT Manager beamed and congratulated us. With two more days to go and no option to change our flights, I offered to conduct a few training sessions. Debanjan taught a short course on AIX system administration, and I ran a DB2/SQL basics workshop. It turned into a rather pleasant Thursday.

But we were wary. What if another issue cropped up? So we decided to leave on Friday itself, taking a local taxi out to a nearby town -- the name escapes me -- where we’d catch a train to Jabalpur the next morning. We didn’t wait for our Saturday car from Jabalpur. We just wanted to get out -- mission accomplished.

The town was small, the hotel even smaller. Rooms were Rs. 100 a night, with a Rs. 30 “upgrade” for a black-and-white TV. We tried to buy some liquor to celebrate, but no luck -- no liquor stores nearby, and we had no vehicle. Still, we slept well. Saturday was an uneventful train to Jabalpur and then an Indian Airlines flight back to Calcutta.

We never heard from HCL again. Which either means the system worked perfectly -- or, more likely, they never actually used the machine their management had paid for.