Random Talk 2

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More than a dozen people have implied that I follow, if not imitate, R K Narayan. I do not know if it is a compliment or a slur.

Bracketing poor me with RKN in anyway is like the swan and the duck thing.

Yet there is no doubt that I read RKN's Collected pieces: 'Next Sunday' many times over the past 40 odd years since its first publication, with great pleasure but without any intention nor premonition that I would be blogging 40 years down the line. I didn't read his novels though with that much pleasure. I enjoyed his 'My Days' but read it only once.

I first met the discursive essay which RKN popularized in Oliver Wendell Holmes's 'Autocrat of the Breakfast Table'. I read and re-read this book once every decade for the last half a century. Most folks can't even stand the first few pages. That way I am 'classical'.

RKN had some advantages as well as disadvantages compared with the modern Blogger.

Disadvantages first: There was no Word Processor, Google and online Webster. These are boons indeed for the Blogger. One can only imagine how many more pieces RKN would have written if he were writing today.

Advantages: In his time there was no Internet, You-Tube, 100-Channel Color TV. So, he had a captive audience. All his 'Next Sunday' pieces appeared in The Sunday Magazine of The Hindu. That was the cheapest and most affordable reading matter then. My granpa, a Retired Tahsildar, who was the favorite steno of the British 'Cotton Dora' who was the pioneer of River Godavari irrigation System and whom YSR, the late CM of AP, took up as his hero; read The Hindu cover to cover everyday during the 35 years of his retired life (he lived to 90 and missed his Hindu only during his last 3 years of paralysis).

RKN makes two contradictory statements, maybe at different stages in his career.

First, he says that an author like him works 'blind' unlike an artiste like a musician in a katcheri or a Dramatist or a Professional Magician, all of whom have a Live Audience and the feedback is instantaneous if at times riotous with rotten eggs and such missiles as live feedback. Not to talk of Physics Teachers like me of Second Year B Tech Chemical Engineering students of the 1980s when the attendance of 60 students was full (there were no pcs with Internet in Halls). But RKN did have his Royalties from Sales, a rough indication of his popularity.

But most of today's non-professional Bloggers have zero feedback. There are so many avocations for folks today that he is 'read' by anyone at all is a matter of great satisfaction, in spite of all the 'composing' advantages we now have compared to RKN as mentioned above.

Secondly, RKN says that he used to get so many fan-mails that he had absolutely no time to reply and had to consign them to the Great Basket rather apologetically. That anyone had his mailing address or bothered to write in long hand on postcards spending good money is itself a matter of great credit. Just imagine if RKN were alive today and disclosed his e-mail id (as some budding Journalists do)! I am sure I myself would have bombarded him daily first with praise followed by my own things which I expect him to read and praise and perhaps recommend for publication in the Sunday Magazine of The Hindu.

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Let me talk of some 'kind words an coronets' I got during the last 24 hours:

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I was moaning to Dharmesh that unlike him I have no 'inventive' powers since I could never write even a short story forget a novelette; all my blogs were colored versions of my own experiences. He replies:

"Regarding you being inventive, I would say the reality you portray in your posts is much more appealing than my 'inventive' paper".

There is perhaps something in that. The few readers I have SHARE my experiences, whether of KGP or our common My India fo the 1950s.

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Saswat writes:

"I am having so much fun reading your blogs. Some of them make me nostalgic for KGP, some of them are physics-fun and I suspect some of them have a "moral of the story" as well."

Morals apart, the nostalgia for KGP is all too real. There is (or was) some magic in the atmosphere of KGP. Even just after 4 or 5 years, students miss it very badly, in spite of all its backwardness. And imagine me after 40 years, most of it my youth. For a full 2 years after my retirement I was daily waking up with a KGP-based dream. Now it is KGP-based blogs.

The only other dream-settings I have are my 7-year stint at my school-days in my sea-side village. And I NEVER dream of my 7-year stint at my University. I learned nothing there nor enjoyed a single day, in spite of my adolescence (14-21) and my standing University First in my B Sc (Hons). The reas0ns were several.......

Saswat also says:
"I hope we keep hearing stories from you from the old times - like today's blog on Bharavi - which you retell in this amazing ticklish language. It's a riot!"

This looks like an invitation to an entirely new genre in story-retelling, like the Fables for Modern Times (1940s!) by Thurber. Interesting suggestion...Fables for my granddaughter Ishani in rib-tickling "tomorrow's jargon" Why not?

Thanx Saswat!

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Supratim says:

"Being a lapsed physicist, my knowledge of many physics topics have become a bit rusty, but the post which thrilled me the most (much like the thrill I experienced when DB taught us the proof of Noether's theorem in the beginning of his Particle Physics course) was "water-borne ideas". Your account of Schiff's discovery of spin precession was wonderful. Beauty is often an elusive concept, but the image of the spinning earth sweeping the nearby spacetime and making the gyroscope in the satellite wobble is, in my mind, a beautiful one".

There is nothing like "lapsed physicist". Even Dharam Vir (IAS, Secreatry, Haryana) and Subba Rao (IAS, present Governor of Reserve Bank) are just 'phycists', not lapsed. The Physics Training never leaves!

Yes, I too was so thrilled by Spin Precession that it was the first (of six) M Sc Projects I allotted to my Project Students at KGP in successive years.

I am rather proud of my 'spin -series' of seven blogs. I termed them 'Unpopular Physics', writing to the IISc Professor...because no one without a Physics background can make much of them, but those with Physics background consdier them 'popular' physics. Let us say, 'semi-popular'!

Thanx for now!

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