“How
do you spell ‘sorry’?”
“S
R I”
“Come
again…”
“S
R I”
If
you thought that was a mother querying her teen-age ward, that would have been
a very good guess. But, unfortunately the truth lies elsewhere, in Lhasa. It
was in 1950 a Brit had a non-fatal encounter with the Chinese just outside of
Lhasa, Tibet and the above exchange, part of “countless interrogations, for
five years”, conveniently paraphrased, took place. This is what I understood from an obit on Robert Ford, a radio engineer hired circa late 1940s by Tibetans to get “Tibet get in touch with the outside world”, in The Economist (October 5th,
2013).
In
the light of no knowledge of an extended earlier SMS, I nominate the following
as the Ur SMS at a high level of sophistication.
The
extended message in Robert Ford’s logs went like this: SRI OM CONDK PR; when queried under interrogation in a prison by the Chinese, Robert translated it as
“Sorry old man, conditions poor.”
Just
imagine, a thousand years later some Hindu preacher stumbles on this message;
she would immediately antiquate it to at least 5,000 years earlier, and the
next step will be to claim that Tibetans knew about SRI and OM!
But,
sorry.
Oops,
S R I!
Raghuram
Ekambaram
No comments:
Post a Comment