Father & Son

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The greatest Father-Son Pair in Literature that I have read are the Wellers: Tony & Sam.

In Politics and Cricket there are dozens; like the topical Pataudi Nawabs.

I don't know if there are Father-Son Pairs who are quite unlike each other. As I said earlier:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2011/03/games-old-men-play.html

my son doesn't look like me, unless you are an expert in 'pattern recognition'.

The first time when someone saw him (without me) and guessed he was my son was Nikhilesh Bhattacharya...but he was a Computer Graphics Expert.

Recently, Saswat remarked, on seeing my son's photos, that he wondered how he missed our striking resemblance while he was at KGP.

The day my son got admitted to the Chemistry Department at KGP as a student (for the next five years), we came to a gentlemen's agreement that I would never visit the Chemistry Department to be seen together.

And we stuck to it.

The Chemistry Professors knew me and also came to know that my son is in their Department, one of the 14 odd chaps in the Class. Apparently there were tea-shop meetings to decipher which of these 14 blokes is gps' son (Chemistry Profs are not into Pattern Recognition).

Some of them decided that this fair, tall and smiling guy in the last bench should be Professor Rao's son since he was always found riding on his scooter, first as a Pillion and later as a Driver (Professor Rao is popular, tall, fair and smiling). But they were told that Professor Rao's son was admitted to the CSE Department and couldn't reconcile how a swap between Chemistry and CSE could take place...very unlikely.

My son is orthogonal to me in all respects: he loves music, hates English literature, is very good at workshop practice, has many friends, can understand spoken American English, sleeps soundly, and is likable to one and all....

But these differences are obvious.

The most fundamental difference between him and me, I discovered last evening, is this:

His Yahoo Inbox has 174 Unread Messages....

QED


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