X for Xerox

Sometime in mid eightees, my dad and his brother-in- law joined hands in a venture with the tag line Ram & Rao - the business introduced my uncle and an edifice of a xerox machine into the expanse of my dad's office space. My siblings and I flocked around what looked like a cargo vessel with finer details magically produced copies of documents in a hazy shades of grey. The unit that occupied most of a 12x12 room stood like a land mark in dad's office, drawing eyes and feet to it like a focal point. Each time a customer came in with a mark sheet, property deed or a birth certificate that needed to be copied, we used to cautiously stand out of the boundary of the room and watch without batting the eyelids. There were several steps involved - it almost looked like a woman going through gestation, forming and nurturing an independent being in her womb. There were seeds of the leafy vegetable Amaranthus and a soot like fine powder in jet black that was sprinkled into one of the retracting drawers before the final copy slid through the opening that had a tray which caught the end result. The xerox machine was a promise of the technology in the offing and the pride of our home business. Time rolled out into decades and we saw the automatic counterparts of the very machine spring into being, that occupied only a fraction of the space and were a 1 2 3 easy operation. Now when I look at the copier, printer, scanner and fax machine we have in our home I fondly trace back to the childhood days where small things were big and big things were small :)