By Mr. Inder Kapoor
I remember an incident about the use of telephones during my long career of journalism in India. It happened when the Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited India in the later part of the fifties. I was then working with the Press Truss of India (PTI) as a junior reporter. Mr. Khrushchev was making a goodwill visit to India following his first welcome visit in 1955. He became an instant friend of Nehru, the first prime minister of India, who shared a vision of India as a Socialist Republic similar to USSR.

Indian farmers, in those days, applied traditional methods for tilling land with bullocks and hard physical labor. Khrushchev promised to help India modernize its methods of cultivating by providing tractors, dozers and other agricultural machinery. One purpose of his revisit was to witness the agricultural developments in India with the aid of Russian tools and machinery. The place selected for his visit was Suratgarh in northern Rajasthan where many of these machinery and equipment were warehoused and maintained. Khrushchev was also scheduled to deliver a speech there.

Suratgarh, a quiet dusty town in those days, did not experience the visit of a high profiled dignitary before. All of a sudden, the town burst into activities – paving roads, making temporary shelters, erecting bamboo poles for electric and telephone lines. A temporary tent with a single telephone was set up for the press reporters from PTI, Reuters, API, BBC and other agencies.

Those were the days with no mobile phones, emails or other computer facilities. Reporters had no easy way to communicate news fast enough to the world. Telephones or telegrams were the usual ways. When reporting from a remote town in India, a reporter who could get hold of a phone faster than others often stole the show. One of the first lessons I learnt from a veteran journalist during my early years of journalism, was to look for a household with telephone upon my arrival in a town.

Unfortunately, in Suratgarh I had no such luck. I went over to the tent set up for the press on the day before Khrushchev’s arrival and sought out the person in charge. I asked him politely the procedures for making phone calls.

“S’aab! The telephone is there but it doesn’t work.” He said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it does and it does not. You will have to shout through the earpiece and not through the mouth piece.” He answered.
I was astounded. I tipped the guy for his valuable piece of information and left the place.

The speech on the following day made a great history in the relationship between Soviet Russia and India. Khrushchev promised more help for India in various sectors of development including agricultural and industrial. When Khrushchev ended his speech and before he left the podium, I ran to the tent to make the phone call to the PTI headquarters in Delhi. But there were already two reporters ahead of me and the rest followed. The person in charge had a simple rule for each one of us– one minute for each caller. The first guy went inside. Soon we could hear his curses as he came out all flustered. The same fate met with the second reporter, disappointment written all over his face. Then my turn came. I quietly approached the booth, smiled and made my phone call enunciating each word as I shouted through the earpiece. I was elated almost foreseeing the news clip in all major newspapers in India next day bearing the caption:

“Reported from Suratgarh – Inder Kapoor, PTI”.