The Aura of A 4 ! It is the size of paper and the ease of reading that matters!

#A4 PAPER # MANAGEMENT

As a lanky, happy and ever smiling 26 year old in a NOC, I used always wonder as to why my boss insisted everything in A4!

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Then, all geological expressions, came in 1 : 50,000 or 1: 20,000 scale contraptions. I used to muse and lament the the loss of clarity in reducing a beautiful hand drawn contour map into a contorted bonsai ! Reprography was very primitive then. Massive ammonia prints of maps , drafted by a drawing officer in a tracing paper ( later into Reduced tracing films ) fulfilled our expressions. Reducing them was costly, yet a management necessity for decision making.

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Let us look at it from a perspective from the top. The invariable lack of time in a quagmire of quick decision making, the top management was always looking for crisp and an easily manageable booklet to broadly envisage the problem and then catch the spiked point in the document, wherein lay the problem , and involutedly, the answer as well ! Simple, is’nt it? And all this happened in A4 packages. Opening a huge map and clumsily, laying it on a table in a management meeting was never a good idea. Off course, the classical geologist still loved it.

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While reducing a huge map to A4 size, all the annotations on the map was reduced to an illegible scribble. While leafing through the Bulletins of an international , technical Geoscience Society, we were struck by the lovely small maps with big annotations ! So we started making massive annotations on big map which looked ugly in originals and wonderful when reduced to A4!

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All this was only a flashback ! 38 years have rolled by. The setting is different. Excellent reprographic modes, workstations, software , GIS and the works converts one’s work into an inveterate zany output. Yet, the aura of A4 still remains! The top management still swears by it.

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In a life of everlasting change, the crave for A4 still remains. It is as constant as the pleasure of hearing Lata Mangeshkar ( celebrated playback singer and distinguished artist in India) again and again on the Fm radio channel over the last n,th years.

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I only wish , Pablo Picasso and Leonardo Da Vinci was born in our times and I would have loved to see the creativity flow, off course on ……..A4!

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