SCRAM…?
Hemant
Kumar ’73
Sometimes time
stands still. Some other times it flies. Yet some other times it flies in
reverse gear (my apologies to Albert. Albert who? Einstein of course). On one
such occasion I went back to the time when I had joined as SCRA at Jamalpur,
only to be told by my worthy seniors that it was SCA out here. The ‘R’ had been
dropped for some obvious reason that were not so obvious to me at that time,
and I am none the wiser now.
I believe it was
dropped because it referred to ‘Railway’ and was considered redundant, because
if you were an apprentice at Jamalpur, where else could you be if not in
Railways. Perfect logic. But then could someone enlighten me why we have DRMs
and CAO(R)s? If it is felt that they have a public life too, my argument is
that the apprentices too have to interact with people outside Jamalpur as well.
The mystery clouds a little more. However, for reasons best known to some
unknown person(s), they are still called SCAs at IRIMEE.
In our first few
hours at Gymkhana, we came to know that SCAs become SAMs after passing out from IRIMEE. I thought that everybody
got a chance to go to Uncle SAM after passing out, till the bubble burst, and
was told that ‘SAM’ stood for “Special Apprentice Mechanical’. My confusion was
confounded. Where did he (there were no lady-apprentice at that time) loose his
‘Class’ after passing out? I also failed to comprehend how come he was still an
‘Apprentice’ even after passing out from IRIMEE. If we think about redundant
alphabets, then even ‘M’ is redundant, because this is the only scheme in
India, and ‘Special Apprentice’ alone would have sufficed. Also, did we not
refer to the electrical engineers who have passed out from this Institution as
SAMs? Why not SAEs? If that were to confuse with the Society of Automobile
Engineers, why not SALs? After all the Member Electrical is the ML. It would be
convenient for other services too, if we were to open the scheme for them. They
could be called SACs and SASs for Civil and S&T engineers.
Anyway, we continue to be SAMs and with good reason too, which I have
realised in recent years. Granted that one has to be ‘Special’. Granted also
that one has to refer to the ‘Apprentice’ in us (after all does one not keep on
learning till the very end?). Also granted that one has to refer to
‘Mechanical’ as the service to which one is presently catering. It is very well
that we have left the ‘Class’ back in the classrooms, or else we would have
been referred to as SCAMs. God forbid. We already have so many of them (scams)
in the recent years that we would not like to be associated with the name let
alone seem to be supplementing them.
Suddenly my
tube-light lit up. What fore sight our forefathers had. Had they not dropped
the ‘R’ from ‘SCRA’, where would we have been? SCRAM…!