Welcome, Guest Sign Up | Login | Try Premium

Profile Balkrishan Khindria

Personal history
June 07, 2010 | By Naresh Khanna

Both our adult histories begin in the West Delhi of the mid-1970’s where I helped to build up a scanner department at Mehta Offset Works in Naraina with a Hell C296 Chromograph, imported second-hand, and a Harris Fototronic 600 typesetter on which we set English and Devanagari using blind Datek keyboards that produced a punched paper tape. I had not met Balkrishan Khindria then, but he had given up his job in a travel agency and joined Monotype India as a sales and liaison officer which means government sales. He shared a cabin with NS Manku in the Asaf Ali Road office which still had a picture of Queen Elisabeth II as you entered, even when I visited it in 1979.

Balkrishan Khindria of Memory Systems shows a new flexo plate mounting device at the Mundku factory in West Delhi

Balkrishan told me the other day that among his other achievements in those days, he sold an Alphacomp phototypesetter to a company in Chandigarh that was still using letterpress, explaining to them that they needed to get started on the future. I tell him that one of my first consulting clients bought the same Alphacomp in spite of my telling him not to because he was good friends with the guys in Monotype. They were the nicest guys — for years they were able to sell the most obsolete stuff simply because of the brand. That’s another story.

Balkrishan tells me that his father’s business partner first built an electric pot for melting lead for type. That’s right — for mixing in the antimony and tin that make lead castable and usable as letter-forms. Balkrishan and his friend Darshanlal Chadha, another Monotype employee perfected the device and it became a substitute for imported crucibles in the days of the Monocasters.

Sensing the big opportunities in the changeover to offset, Khindria and Chadha gave up their jobs and expanded their manufacturing to whirlers for the coating of deep-etch offset plates and the printing down frames to expose them. They used new materials — fibre glass for making whirlers and sinks for instance, and this naturally shocked their one time employers when one of the worthies from Surrey first saw the equipment at an exhibition.

I may have met him earlier but I remember my meeting with Balkrishan when Memory Systems was already a going concern. We met in the basement of Tej Press in the early 1980’s where I was consultant and he had come to install one of his printing down frames with a metal halide lamp. This was quite a step forward in those days, doing away with those swinging arc lamps with two or three sparking, buzzing and hissing carbon rods. The lightning effect made the platemaking rooms look like a mix between a welding shop and an electric arc steel furnace. In fact one of my fights those days was simply to clean up the platemaking section with its imprecision and its filth and its deep-etch plates. Nevertheless Mohijit Sengupta and I co-wrote the first step by step guide on ‘How to make a deep-etch plate’ for one of the early issues of Indian Printer and Publisher.

Over the years I met Balkrishan at exhibitions where he unfailingly and with great enthusiasm showed me an innovation each and every time. He built vertical cameras and dampening roller washing machines. He once showed me a metal stand with an X-Y mounted magnifier for inspecting plates before they went on press. At another show he showed me a plate punch, then a Gammerler stacker-bundler at the end of one of his friends’ web offset presses.

I heard that he had set up in Noida and I wanted to meet him and see his factory. But by the time I called him up, he said that he had moved out many years ago. We had encounters in IPAMA situations since he was and still is an office holder — generally sweet and non-committal if I was pushing some sensible idea; and generally rude when one typically left an IPAMA exhibition with its long line of irate exhibitors trying to get an exit pass.

The renovated office block at Memory Systems factory at Mundku in West Delhi

The other day when I called up Balkrishan, he says come over. We take the metro to Kirti Nagar and he drives us over to his new factory in Mundku. The Metro has come to Mundku too but the link station at Kirti Nagar is not quite ready. We both marvel at this concrete and steel rope that now pulls us together stringing Noida and Mundku and our stories of the past 35 years. There are many stories and players but neither of us are sentimental and generally wind up talking about the future.

The 3,500 square metre factory with a just renovated office block speaks of modernity with its plate glass windows and coloured aluminium panels. On the ground floor, the CNC turret punch for slotting and bending sheet metal and the other CNC machining centres lead to the machine shop with conventional lathes.

The products are a string of revelations, laminators and machines for graining and texturing paper and board. A new machine that automatically cleans and gums used plates and saves press time. A large exposure frame for the textile industry. Brushed stainless steel fabrications of hospital furniture — a more recent diversification.

Memory Systems not only exports to Europe, North American and Africa but also awaiting a large order from China. This competitiveness answers many questions that we have not even asked — it is an insight to the development of Indian graphic arts equipment suppliers — and not just the big names in the Western and Southern part of the country.

We go up to the air-conditioned office block and meet Balkrishan’s partner Darshanlal Chadha. We meet Balkrishan’s brother Gopal. We meet Sanjeev, the next generation marketing head and Gaurav, the next generation design engineer and we meet Aman who looks after production. In the conference room we see where generation next is headed — a huge variety of postpress equipment, case makers, mini-guillotines and perfect binders for digital presses, pneumatic book presses, and die-cutters and folder gluers for canton making imported from China.

We go back to Balkrishan’s room to drink the strongly flavoured tea from Baba’s ashram — to tell stories and talk more about the future. We talk about how the drum and toner technology is a transitional for one for digital presses. Balkrishan speaks from experience — he tried his hand at digital printing with an Indigo 3500 a few years ago — and while he is full of praise for the Indigo quality he admits it was not his cup of tea. We are both waiting for the larger format full-colour inkjet engines at higher speeds and cheaper ink.

There is a confidence that comes when the next generation is educated and given a solid base with an opportunity to engineer, fabricate and market professionally. Gaurav is already running three licences of Solidworks for 3-dimensional product design. The bay in the centre of the office block is ready for the day when it will be populated by product designers who drive the factory downstairs to machine, fabricate, powder coat and assemble new products.

Sanjeev is already ready with postpress for bookbinding and carton making for the conventional printers and convertors. He is ready with finishing equipment for the digital presses. Balkrishan is looking out for when the next transition will take place — five years, ten years, or will it be fifteen? As I go back to Noida on the Metro I am happy that I have found a place to take my drawings of steel pieces to cut and polish and powder coat with bright colours and black, to string them into gravity defying mobiles for the atrium.