“Apan bhal to jagat bhal”

: – If you are good yourself then all others will appear nice-

Old Assamese saying…

It was either Sardar Khushwant Singh or Ernest Hemingway who wrote that if you want to be a published author you should learn to type from head to paper.

Thus I begin my story of Nazira Town, the headquarters of what was then known as the Eastern Region Business Centre of the Oil & Natural Gas Corporation Ltd where I lived with my family from 1994-1997 and where in the shopping street one could buy everything ranging from chicken, groceries, dictionaries, vegetables and bicycles, that I had the fortune of purchasing a second hand portable typewriter.

Assam is a beautiful region with beautiful gentle people, but then disturbances began in the late 1970s and the green colour of the paddy fields plus tea gardens got smeared with that of black oil and red blood.

When I moved in with my family to Assam the violence had abated and the ONGC had made good provision of basic amenities of housing, security, schooling of children and medical support.

For some months though we had to live in shared quarters; further I had a background of bipolar disorder which required the care of a psychiatrist then available only in Dibrugarh 50 kms away.

Fortunately I had good friends like V. Radhakrishnan and Subal Bose also electronics engineers, Narendra Pal Singh, Dutta Paradkar both Russian language experts assigned to P&A (Personnel & Administration) duties, my country cousins Amitesh Pant and Deepak Misra also from that cadre, and many many others who I’ll mention as my story unfolds and new friendships began.

Babul Ali

Every morning a group of daily wage workers stood outside the gate of the ONGC complex in Nazira, gathered there so that someone hire their services for the day.

It is there that I first met and engaged Babul Ali regularly for 3 years. He was small statured, good natured and talented; a great assistant he was and a useful companion for me and my family when we ventured out in our old Fiat car especially to visit the psychiatrist at Dibrugarh.

I will return to Babul Ali after I discuss the tremendous professional satisfaction and learning I got in my 3 years at the Well Logging Lab at Nazira.

I was called upon to repair a photographic plotter based on a flat panel Cathode Ray Tube display.

It was an output device of the Gearhart (later acquired by Halliburton) Direct Digital Logging system.

Oil well logging or wireline logging as it was known those days employed ingeniously built downhole tools that were immersed inside an oil well supported by and powered by cables where they electronically peeked at and evaluated the contents of the surrounding oil bearing formation.

One such tool was that for the induction log(record which is also plotted as a function of depth). It had its origins in a device that was used in the second world war to detect mines.

The jeep it is said was the first vehicle that could be paradropped.

During the days of the Normandy landings in the final Allied assault on Hitler’s Germany use was made of science and technology to detect and clear mine obstacles so that the huge concentration of force could advance with minimal casualties.

The bonnet of the jeep was fitted with a radio transmitter and a receiver coil. As the jeep advanced the radio waves scanned the ground ahead. If there happened to be any metallic mine in its path the radio waves would get reflected from it and be picked up by a receiver coil on the bonnet of the jeep. Whenever a strong signal was received it triggered a solenoid that automatically applied the brakes.

The advancing party could then deactivate the mine and proceed onwards.

A similar logic was employed in the induction tool to detect oil and gas in the formation the only difference being whereas the metallic mines were good conductors of electricity and hence reflectors of radio waves, hydrocarbons were insulators. A tool with a transmitter and receiver was lowered into the well and made to descend. The receiver output was recorded as function of depth and whenever its value became small it indicated that at that depth there was a strong likelihood of oil and gas being present in the surrounding rock formation.

The cathode ray tube plotting device was very interesting in its principle of operation. The signal after having been converted from digital to analogue was amplified and applied to the electrostatic deflection plates of the cathode ray tube. Because the surface of this tube was flat instead of being an arc of a circle, the focus voltage for the electron beam had to be ramped up and down as the radius varied from its maximum at one end, a minimum at the centre and again to a maximum at the other end.



It is good that we owned an old Fiat car because the roads were rough, the car was rugged and repairable at the town’s garage owned by a Bihari named Bishu who I think had an Assamese wife.

Jaishri, Bhavya and Manu were and always have been a source of happiness and strength to me. And it was the fact that we were all together with our belongings amongst old friends and making new ones with bonds that got cemented after facing hardship together, and because we were in one of the most beautiful part of the world, mobile and well to do that we experienced Assam unforgettably, despite some really upsetting situations relating to my mental health.

By the grace of God and our friends, an expanded communication network of my caring employer the ONGC, Jaishri, Bhavya and Manu could endure the two hospitalisations I had to undergo at a Christian nursing home at Dibrugarh because of bouts of mania.