Bodymetaphors

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I love metaphors. No metaphor is ever quite 'dead' for me. By metaphor I mean a word known to me in one context being used in quite a different and tickling situation.

A long while ago my IAS B-i-L (a non-stop talker) said (equivocally) of a relative of ours:

"He has a nose for money"

That's it...whenever I see that man or think of him I see a puppy nosing around garbage cans for coins. The other day my son was driving me on our "arterial" Bombay Highway and referred to the adjacent service lane as: "shoulder". And everyday when I drive on that lane I see it as bearing the weight of the highway traffic like Atlas is shown carrying the weight of the earth on his shoulders and sweating. And 3 decades ago when I gave one of my biscuit-colored PRS reprints (with Debashish Chowdhury, once my Project Student, now a big shot) to Bidhan Mohanty (of the Ukridge fame) he flipped through it and remarked: "Hooomm!...Has a lot of meat". And I saw him chewing it bone-dry. And that "biscuit-color" for the PRS reprint is not mine...my friend NP said it and it stuck.

For now let me make a short list of body-metaphors that tickled me when I first heard them. All these are my personal property and you certainly have yours.

In the renowned Lalita Sahasranamam (Thousand words for Lalita) it is said in the first line that she rose from the Fires of Consciousness (chidagni kunda sambhuta) and in the next fifty or so names her features are described from head to toe as she emerged. Likewise, let me start with the head first and go down.

For "head" I distinctly recall the evening when I was an urchin playing with my glass marbles, my Father gloating to my mom, "I am the Head Master now"; and whenever I used to walk along the Phy corridor at IIT KGP and watched the name plate describing the incumbent as the Head of the Department, I always imagined myself as his tail...particularly the proud Prof K V Rao (who I am told put the fear of God into Supratim and his lab partner...I guess Supratim is now Head and is going to do the same...in the glorious tradition of 'orientation').

For the contents of the head, I recall one day Amalendu inviting me to a "brain-storming" session. Of course I didn't go...I went to Harry's for my woolgathering...another pleasant metaphor I met in Thurber first. Let me state that no one who hasn't undergone the very avoidable severe clinical depression knows what a brain-storm is...the damn thing is like a Nor'wester with hail. And one day a certain gora MIT graduate on a six-month visit to KGP told me that he is trying to establish a "think-tank" at IIT and invited me to join...it at once recalled the septic tank I got built a few days back at my Father's place at Gudur...not for me thinking with others like him in the horse-shit that lines the bottom of traditional septic tanks I could never figure out why.

Coming to ears, their "lobes" I met with in the polar plots of antennas and always wondered if they wear ear rings too. And "ear-drum" always sounded like those African drums Feynman used to play under that tree on moonless nights...crazy guy!

And I was simply enchanted when my Father first called the hole in our sewing needle its "eye" (single, like that Calypso I was reading about then).

We met with "nose" already above.

And I was thrilled when our Optics Teacher BHK described the singularity of the Fresnel Wave Surface of a biaxial crystal (my Ph D thesis work a decade later) as the "dimple" of an apple.

KK once showed me an X-Y plot having broad dips (in his nonlinear mechanics) and called them: "tongues"...in trees?

Talking of apples and throats, I once felt my Father's throat lovingly (when he was in a good mood) and asked what that solid projection in his throat is and he replied, "Adam's Apple"...Eves don't have them unless, like my mom in her sixties, they develop thyroid problems.

When they called our diodes and triodes, "valves", I always recalled the heart-valves we read about in our bio.

And "collar" bone...buttons in it? And "shoulder blade"...Gillette? For "ribs" the first metaphor I met with are those of Paul's Umbrella. My Father used to have a mini-workshop and when I asked him what that swinging iron piece is called, he said: "elbow joint". And "left-hand", "right-hand", and "swimming-man's" rules were our bane when we had to read our EM from an arcane book by S G Starling.

Coming to private parts of men, "bag", "tool" and "screw" are notorious enough metaphors. We don't dabble in feminine anatomy since we are gentlemen, but Edwin told me that many General Relativists imputed dirty imagery to his esteemed Princeton collaborator when he came up with his theorem: "Black holes have no hairs"; but it is just infamy (between friends).

On the other hand let me cite an absolutely poetic image of a dark nebulous summer cloud as a "womb" carrying lightning in it...see Svetasvatara Upanishad.

And we have "knee cap" that always feels like a cricket cap on the head of Gavaskar, our Gen Hero.

And for "heel" I read in my Class VII of a boat "heeling" to one side in a charming story with a lovely figure.

Good Night! (All-Out!)


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