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Biscope, copyright Picturejockey : Navin Harish 2005-2012

 

Biscope, copyright Picturejockey : Navin Harish 2005-2012

10th March 2013

Biscope

This is something straignt out of my childhood but I am not very nostalgic about it as a lot of other kids my age might be. The reason, I have never cupped by hands around the steel lunchbox to see the moving images inside.

For those who don't know what a Biscope is, it is a small wooden box with music playing on it. I guess now they use an electronic device, maybe a phone hooked to a speaker and battereies that makes the music but when I was a kid, batteries were not as portable as they are now neither were music player portable or viable for a use like this. In those days these guys used to carry a gramophone on top of the biscope and used to play LPs. It has small windows made of steel lunchboxes with the base cut out and kids could peep through that. What you see inside in not a movie, but a spool of still images which is rotated manually by the man. For a few paise one could look through it but knowing that I will just see static images strung together and not the video of the song, I never was interested in it.