Telegram Tales

1984 was not a very happy year for me. Even though I had successfully completed my B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, the fact that I could not get a 'schol' or an assistantship at a US university left me in deep sorrow. My disappointment was even greater because I had scored a phenomenal 96 percentile in both Verbal and Quantitative sections of the GRE, and many friends with lower scores had made it through — but not me.

Of course, I had admissions from many top schools like the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and even Cornell, but without financial aid, there was no way for me to go to the US.

While I did have a job offer from ORG Systems, my Boro Mama advised me to join the PhD program at IIT Kharagpur itself, because in his opinion, a PhD was essential — a piece of advice that has stood me in good stead till today. Accordingly, I joined the Mech Department again under Prof. P. K. Nag in the Steam Lab to work on Thermodynamics.

Here, I was remarkably successful and, much to the surprise of my guide, delivered two very innovative solutions on fluid flow in the first year itself! Faculty in the department were stunned by my results and said I should be able to finish my PhD in three years. However, things took a different turn.

One fine morning in the spring of 1985, a poster appeared on the Mech Department notice board inviting PhD students to join the Operations Research program at the University of Texas. This was accompanied by a letter from Prof. R. Chandrasekharan indicating that financial aid was available for qualified students.

I had done one course in OR taught by Prof. K. C. Sahu from the Industrial Management Centre (now a Department), as part of the mandatory requirement to take a management subject. So, then and there, I decided to give it a shot. My guide, Prof. P. K. Nag, was also planning to move to Canada and had no issues with me abandoning my 'ripe' PhD work and aiming for the US again.

Once again, I put together my application package and sent it to Dallas with high hopes. Airmail was, of course, the only way to communicate in those days, and that is how I sent my application, the “transcripts” from the Students Section -- photocopies of my grade card, duly stamped with ink -- and the all-important three recommendations from Prof. Amalendu Mukherjee (my B.Tech guide), Prof. P. K. Nag (my current guide), and Prof. K. C. Sahu (who had taught me OR).

Then I waited and waited and waited with bated breath.

At IIT, the spring term ended and the summer vacations started. The campus emptied out as most students went home or for summer training. Of course, as a PhD student, I did not have summer vacation, so I continued with my thermodynamics -- with one eye cocked for the postman, who was the only one who could bring me any news.

And when the news came, it was devastating.

The Admissions Office of UTD had written to me stating that my application was not yet complete. Everything was there except the recommendation from Prof. K. C. Sahu, which had not yet arrived. Without it, the application could not be processed -- even if Prof. Chandrasekharan wanted to. The letter urged me to ensure that the missing document reached the university before the application deadline — and that deadline was just two days away from the day I received the letter.

Unfortunately, in those days, there was no way to track where exactly the recommendation was stuck, nor was it possible to send another letter from Kharagpur to Dallas within two days. What to do?

The campus was nearly deserted, so there was hardly anyone I could consult for ideas. My father was in Calcutta and, by then, had begun to fall into the grip of the Alzheimer’s that would finally take him seven years later. I was panicking and in deep despair. So near, yet so far -- and all because of a missing letter.

Then it struck me! The only way a message from Kharagpur could reach Dallas in time was by telegram -- the then-not-so-ancient technology that was still widely used in India to send short, cryptic messages almost instantly. But would this work?

A recommendation letter could not be cryptic -- it had to have content. That would make it expensive. Also, recommendations were supposed to be signed and sealed in confidential envelopes. Would UTD accept an open, non-confidential telegram? There was no way to know. There was no one to ask. In any case, I decided to give it a shot.

I ran --  or rather cycled -- to Prof. K. C. Sahu's residence. He kindly and readily agreed to help me, and for that I would always be grateful. Not only did he agree to send the telegram -- at his own cost -- but he agreed to refer in it to a formal sealed letter that was being sent in parallel. So, armed with his “staccato” recommendation -- full of STOP words, as was the case in all telegrams -- I rushed to the Post Office to send it off.

The telegram clerk had never seen such a long message before, but on payment of the rather large fee -- it was something like ₹5 for 30 words for foreign telegrams -- the message was accepted and sent. This was, of course, followed by the formal, signed, and sealed recommendation letter as per protocol.

Then began the wait again -- for the postman to knock, or rather, to leave a foreign letter on the mess table at B. C. Roy Hall, where I had moved from Azad Hall after joining the PhD program.

This time, the message was good! I had finally landed an admission with full financial aid to the Management Science program at UT Dallas under Prof. R. Chandrasekharan. My joy knew no bounds — thanks to the timely gamble with a telegram.

But that was the second-last telegram. What about the last?

When I finally reached Dallas in the fall of 1985, I needed to inform my parents in Calcutta of my safe arrival. I thought -- once again -- that a telegram would be cheaper than an international phone call. So I asked my roommate Venky where the nearest telegram office was. By that time, telegrams had become obsolete in the US and hardly anyone knew how to send one!

Finally, after asking around quite a bit, we discovered that the only way to send a telegram was to call Western Union and dictate the message over the phone -- which is what I did.

But I still don’t know how I was charged. Was it on my friend’s credit card? Or was it added to our phone bill from Southwestern Bell -- the “Baby Bell” company that had just emerged from the breakup of AT&T the previous year? I have no memory or record of that.