Interest

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Many well-meaning people, from my IAS B-i-L (GRR) who wrote the Foreword to my first booklet, Limericks and Light Verses, to young ones like Siddhartha and Aniket, compared my earliest blogs to the writings of RKN.

Of course they were being nice and encouraging me to carry on. RKN is a gentleman (note the present tense...writers and bloggers never die), while I am a rogue. RKN writes clean prose unlike me.

But there is one respect in which we are like Siamese Twins...our attitude to mathematics. Listen to RKN:

"There recently appeared a news item that a profound mathematical discovery has been made, a solution to a problem that has been bothering the minds of mathematicians for half a century...I view the news without emotion. This mathematical discovery may thrill some people, but it leaves me cold. Mathematics is a matter of constitution. It is like music. Some people (like gps) are tone deaf and often wonder how any adult could go on sitting in a hall for three or four hours, tolerating the noise and gesticulations of a singer. In the same way I am, if I may coin the expression, 'figure-blind.' My mind refuses to work when it encounters numbers. Everything that has anything to do with figures is higher mathematics to me. There is only one sort of mathematics and that is the higher one..."

Not my mom, who never went to school beyond her 'elementary' one. When I was 13 and we were living in a rented house, our landlady made a disparaging remark I overheard that my mom's is a 'business mind.' It was unkind because being Brahmins we were supposed to be unworldly about money. A decade later when we were talking of this and that, I asked my mom what she found most interesting in her life. She smiled and replied outright, "Interest". No pun was intended since our dialogue was in Telugu and the two words involved were unpunny.

I was amazed and asked her why. She said that if you have some money, even a small amount, and leave it in the Bank and forget about it, it grows like wildfire. I still didn't get the import of her assertion. She then said that one of her widowed aunties used to give hand-loans to her needy friends from the tiny cash her husband left her, collect hefty interest, and plow it back. When she died, her son who used to look after her found enough cash in her chest to buy a huge house (she lived to ninety and her son was a spendthrift like me).

And then I saw all those handsome Kabuliwalas at the Harry's Corner at KGP of whom I wrote in the blog:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/10/tipheraray.html

I am not the only fool in math...there was this king who liked chess so much that he asked its inventor a boon and laughed when the chap said: "Give me one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth..." and went broke.

I asked my Father, who took his first life insurance for Rs 3000 for 30 years, what his annual premium was; and was astonished when it turned out to be less than Rs 100. And asked him how they cover his life. He was just like me in math and couldn't explain...I should have asked my mom.

I was also feeling very happy that I was cheating the Govt of India by living long and drawing ever-increasing pension; till a knowledgeable friend told me that I was being cheated instead, since I had foregone its entire PF contribution when I retired when the interest rates were huge. And that the GoI was betting I will die soon after my retirement...which I almost did; and many of my colleagues unfortunately did indeed.

And I also never understood why during those golden days SBI was giving me Traveler's Cheques absolutely free. And to this day I don't understand how Credit Card donors make money when I repay them without default...I guess many don't...and it is covered up.

And when I was told in my first year of college that the innocuous Harmonic Series diverges, I didn't believe it and tried to work it out term by term and gave it up soon enough. And SDM once told me: "The Taylor Series of e to the power of any number, even, 10,000 converges." And guessing rightly that I would try it out term by term foolishly, explained in his inimitable way that "the power term in the numerator dominates in the beginning but there comes a time when the factorial in the denominator kills it ultimately."

Strange, isn't it? I used to tell Mrs N who holds a Ph D in Math that her subject is not science but Voodoo. And when she protested, I quoted Ramanujan confessing that many of his weird conjectures on Divergent Series that foxed hardy boy Hardy were revealed to him in his dreams by their family Goddess Namagiri of Namakkal of his hometown Kumbakonam.

DB told me that his God Gel'fand once admitted that his math comes from 'above'.

And I have yet to see a Pure Mathematician who is straight...not that I made friends with many, ThanQ!

Yet it is a wonder that I did a thesis full of tensors under that weird one, SDM, with two 'independent' Papers (out of five)...that is the power of Midas Touch...while it lasts.


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