The Coonoor connection

A nice thing about blogging is it enables connectivity that transcends memory; insofar as it re-connects one-time friends who have long ceased to remember each other. I heard from such a friend, Mr Marshall Gass in New Zealand, the other day, for no reason other than that he happened to Google something I wrote in zine5 some time back – ‘And so I must write to GVK and say Hi’. The zine5 piece had “stirred the tentacles of an old memory”.

Mr Gass used to blog in a Coonoor site I hosted before moving to Mysore. Of the site, Mr Gass, who had left Coonoor over 35 years back, wrote; “So many mates from the old school days have made contact since my e-mail went on this site (Coonoor Connection) – Hindley, Ramamurthy, Francis Mathews, Eates. Amazing. It was the best fun in the world, catching up with those guys I played marbles with 35 years back”.

In his e-mail this Coonoor-connected New Zealander said his memories of the place were ‘browned and faded like an antique photograph’ and described Coonoor as ‘epitaph of a cherubic dream’. “The contacts appeared and disappeared, and once in a while I get the do-you-remember-me story”, writes Mr Gass, “I most often do”.

I write to him saying we have moved on to Mysore, and had to abandon the Coonoor site, now dead out of sheer neglect. But then Mr Gass has a Mysore connection as well. Look up his blog entry in Impressions – ‘Up close and cheeky with Mysore crocs’.