Flippers or Zippers?

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"Whom God has equipped with flippers should not monkey around with zippers.”

.........................................Thurber: "The Seal Who Became Famous"

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Teenage is best described as a confused state of affairs.

For some blessed folks like me it continues confused forever.....

Before this novel state dawns, things are pretty well-ordered:

You have your treasure-chest of peacocks, elephants and ivory: I mean golies (of chalk, glass, and steel), your half a dozen latthoos (tops) of various sizes, shapes and pock-marks they took in the 'ring', your cigarette packet covers of fixed (not floating) Rupee Values ranging from 100 for the Goldflake Honeydew to 10 for Charminar and a priceless rare Passing Show that trades anything between 500 and 1000; and your gulli-danda equipment.

When these are temporarily locked up a week before the Annual Exams, you have your largely untouched text-books to mug up in competition with three of your neighboring kids all out in their verandahs under hurricane lamps that flicker and growl.

Then suddenly certain strange things begin to happen.

You get to read story books like Lorna Doone and Lilliputians and King Arthur and Lancelot and Achilles with his heel and two birds called Kingfisher and Woodpecker you never get to see. And your imagination soars. You fancy that you are an actor in the books you read: Tom Brown or Harry East. And Christina Rosetti's Rainbow with the cute figure of a single boat under a river bridge rushes new and unsuspected nooks and corners of your one-room tenement.

Things don't help if your HM Father pretends to read his bound book of Tennyson Poetry sitting at one end of a hooded country boat tugged along the steamy Buckingham Canal while you fear for your life at the other end...the 'done thing' for him...not that he really enjoys it.

And suddenly that skinny girl classmate of yours who has been competing with you fiercely for the first rank from Class V appears in a very different confusing light..

And you get sucked into the whirlpool of Physics as your lifelong career without your knowledge or consent, just because it happens to be the most convenient option for everyone concerned (except you); while all the while you watch with envy your classmates donning yellow-blotched cheap white overalls with steths hanging stylishly from their carefree necks...

You never get to know if God in his unexplained wisdom equipped you with flippers or zippers or rippers...

The burden of a subject you never understood the way you want to, haunts you till you happily quit and take to posting everyday about 400 silly words hoping that your panel of a dozen Board of tough Examiners chaired by that Aniket would someday award you a D Sc of Calcutta University.....

Feel like Paul Gaugin waiting in the sweaty queue to shut shop and run away to those South Pacific Islands...

That South Pacific reminds you of the sunny winter morning you walked down a furlong from your home at Vizagh to the Sea Beach with a book of poetry, aping your father, climb awkwardly the 8-foot craggy rock, squat but forget all about that poetry book because you are charmed by the twinkling mill-pond-like sea and watch the hundred tiny fishing boats and a ship anchored at the horizon; and doze like Rip van Winkle and wake up and find that the shorter rocks around have all vanished and the sand has receded a 100 feet away and you are marooned in waist-deep salty sea-water on all sides, shout for help waving your mad arms, and get rescued by a couple of smiling weather-beaten fisherman 'chairing' you; and you run for your life dumping poetry and all; and since then try and understand the Physics of tides...

And ask MSS why there is a tide on 'both' sides of earth facing the moon instead of the nearer side alone; and he gives a cryptic reply that tides are due to the 'gradient' of gravity than gravity itself; and you feel shy to repeat the question and wait 40 years till you think you understand Einstein's famous Equivalence Principle that Synge wanted buried with appropriate honors.....

...And imagine you are standing in a freely falling elevator and drop a big wooden ball dipped in oil and watch the oil on the ball nearer the earth bulge downward because the gravity there is a wee stronger than at its center and the oil farther from the earth bulge upward because the gravity there is a wee weaker than at the center of your wooden ball (the mystic 'gradient' of MSS who is no more for you to write to him appreciating his answer) ...and realize like that naked Archimedes that nothing in the Heavens, neither moon nor earth nor Sun nor Andromeda is nailed down to any wall but every damned thing out there is in free fall like your elevator and feel what a fool you have been all these decades not to know this simple state of affairs...

Any companions surviving out there on this lonely road?

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