George McDonald

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Yesterday's DC has this quote by George McDonald:

"Work is not always required....there is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected".

The 'now' there refers to a century and a half ago; for Wikipedia tells me that George was the Guru of Lewis Carroll.

One of our Professors when he was HoD used to refer to the then Director as a "Work-minded Fellow". It looked like a compliment.

Work has several meanings in several contexts. In Physics, the work done by a man standing in the hot Sun with a bag of wheat on his head is precisely zero.

An ex-Director fond of Physics couldn't keep quiet after retirement (unlike me). He had to dabble in Physics, of all things. He sent a question to the above HoD: "What is the Temperature of a laser beam?" The question did the usual rounds and at last landed in my lap, the lazy bone of the Physics department.

I answered: "It depends".

This answer apparently interested the ex-Diro and led to an unlimited round of our one-on-one discussions, the latest being 4 years after my retirement and 24 years after his (when we met at KGP this January). He is 90, but attends Office and presented me with his latest reprint in the Proceedings of the thing at Bangalore. Apparently he is still seized with the laser issue.

Oh, Well! Since he never leaked to me what exactly was his problem, I had to write a monograph on "Lasers..the Light Wave of the Future"; exclusively meant for his eyes. But Prof STA who was the Chairman of the Nehru Museum of Science and Technology published it as NMST..001 (what a Dream!). I am told that the number of the NMST series never exceeded 005.

But I digress as Aniket is fond of saying......

Bertrand Russell also wrote a monograph: "In Praise of Idleness", but as expected, it is a political and not a literary or scientific document (unlike mine).

Work-minded, my foot! Feynman says all his brilliant ideas came to him at weird places and times when 'work' was the last thing on his mind.

It is always 'pleasure' that produces the finest children of the mind and the body.