Saturday, January 02, 2010

Forgotten memories

Sometimes "remembering" forgotten memories is like stumbling across a memory location (or the base address of an array) never accessed for decades. Once you "remember" such a forgotten memory, a chain of memories come along with it. I am experiencing that now.While cleaning my shelves, I found these

Trigger#1 : My pocket oxford dictionary - 1987

It was 1987. I was in the 3rd standard. It was my Upanayanam and I had invited my teacher Mariam Begum for my Munji. She did not come. I was expecting her. Then after sometime at 2:30 she came. She was my favorite teacher (at that point of time). She gave me a present which I had treasured throughout my school life. It was a pocket oxford dictionary. I also learnt my first few "bad words" in 6th standard using that book (also had shown that book to Shiva and Naveena). I had randomly stumbled across these bad words and shown these words to Naveena and Shiva who had commented that dictionary can also be used to learn bad words.I shall keep this for the rest of my life.

My stamp stock book

It must have been 1991,1992 time frame. If you did not have stamp collection as your hobby, you were uncool in our area. I was a stamp collector - Manja was my stamp collection partner for sometime, but he soon lost the interest. After seeing Jayasimha's collection , I was inspired like hell. His "Jamaica stamp" and his "Ethiopia stamp" had driven me insane. I wanted such stamps. The name Jamaica sounded exotic to me. I remembered the Cadbury's Old Jamaica chocolate with raisins. I had collected so many stamps, exchanged matchbox covers to stamps (and vice versa), asked my elder brother Sujay to give me his stamps. My stamp collection is really respectable now. I really have old stuff (but they maybe damaged but they are valuable for sure) :-

-India Under British (1.5 Annas stamp)
-Ceylon stamp (5 cents)
-Colonial Mauritius
-Uganda,Kenya and Tanganyika under British (a postage serving three African countries - Have a lot(6) of these....I am thinking eBay ;-) )
-Colonial Malta
-British Guiana
-Surinam, Cyprus, Greece...wow!
-Congo under Belgium!
-An old stamp says "Principalty of Thomond" no idea where it is from.

But I will keep this for sometime :-) Feeling happy

4 comments:

Tejaswi said...

According to my sister, Magyar Posta and Noyta CCCP were the rarest. I can see now that India under British rule might be interesting in its own right.

sudeep said...

Magyar Posta is Hungarian stamp. I have 3 of them, but I doubt none of them is original.

CCCP is the erstwhile USSR. I also have 5 of these. All of them are fake....

GD said...

I remember the CCCP fake ones. It used to come in a magazine which my dad could get easily somehow. Then there was this art of disassembling it and make it appear as a stamp.

I have traded couple of fake ones for some US/EU ones

Gargi Shah said...

Nice post. I like the base address reference :-)