Sun & Shadows

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While I was living in the Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP, there was this Senior Professor of Organic Chemistry just returned from a spell in Australia...of all places ;-) waiting for a Qrs to be allotted to him so he can bring his family from Calcutta. He was fond of playing Scrabble, which I detested as I felt it was child's play combining luck with spelling prowess.

My favorite word-game was Superghosts reinvented by Thurber and his crazy friends, before the advent of computers which spoil everything good. This game is like the good old parlor game of word-building except that you are permitted to prefix as well as suffix any letter you choose. As Thurber says:

"...Starting words in the middle and spelling them in both directions lifts the pallid pastime of Ghosts out of the realm of children's parties and ladies' sewing circles and makes it a game to test the mettle of the mature adult mind..."

For instance, say, it started off with a 't'. Instead of suffixing 't' with 's' making it 'ts' going towards 'tsunami' as in the old game of Ghosts, you derail it by prefixing 't' with 'z' making it 'zt' open both ways. And the mug sitting after you challenges and you come up with 'Aztec' (allowed since it is in Webster). That would be fun since, after the game is over, you will spend the whole night searching for all other words with 'zt' in the middle and go raving mad.

As Thurber puts it:

"The Superghost aficionado is a moody fellow, given to spelling to himself at table, not listening to his wife, and staring dully at his frightened children, wondering why he didn't detect, in yesterday's game, that 'cklu' is the guts of 'lacklustre', and priding himself on having stumped everybody with 'nehe', the middle of 'swineherd'..."

I was playing this mental game with my school-going nephews and nieces and they were quite enjoying it; and this Organic Chemist wanted me to play Scrabble...Anyway, since I didn't want to hurt him, I used to play his favorite game and lose always, to his utter satisfaction, since I could never play any board game...my attention wanders and I get bored (punny that!)...other than chalky blackboards.

Late one night, I was sitting on the lawn bench and smoking quietly, and he joined and asked me out of the blue:

"What is the main difference between life in Australia and life in India?"...meaning Calcutta ;-)

I said: "You won't see the Pole Star in Australia, and Southern Cross (Crux) in Calcutta."

And he shook his head on its spinal axis and asked me to try again. I then said: "Australia was a land of convicts when India was a land of thugs."

He then gave me a hint that he is referring to the difference between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

And I said: "Arts, Sciences, Literature, Religion, Wars, Torture Chambers were all invented in the Northern Hemisphere. The contribution of Australia is confined to help in plotting the shape of our Milky Way Galaxy...tough because it is like a worm sitting inside the spleen trying to figure out the shape of the entire human body."

He lost his patience and answered his own question:

"In India (read Calcutta) shadows are all to the North, while in Australia they are all to the South."

I then asked him if photography was his hobby. He said: "Yes!" and was quite impressed.

Organic Chemists and Organic Chemistry are weird. They will ask their students to mug up Markownikoff's Rule and cite exceptions to it, which are legions. And ask them to mug up Anit-Markownikoff's Rule. Physicists used to ask their students to mug up Swimming Man's Rule which has no exception at all other than Swimming Woman's, who like backstrokes.

Students of Chemistry at IIT KGP, my son tells me, were dichotomous (I too know ten-dollar words) towards their Organic Chemistry Building. They loved to specialize in it (that is where they thought money is) but were scared because they would be having access to all sorts of chemicals that were decidedly unhealthy. And it had prestige and only toppers could get projects in it. My son was nowhere near the top and so he got a Project under a youthful guide doing Computational Chemistry that eventually led him (my son) to his Bio-IT job. All that glitters is not gold...ask the Prince of Morocco.

Coming back to sun and shadows, Calcutta and KGP were on the Tropic of Cancer and that is why shadows are always to the North. Not in Gudur where I used to spend my summer vacation. On my wedding day, the 17th May, when I walked on its burning streets I couldn't see my shadow...it was all squeezed beneath my feet. Nor in Singapore or Kilimanjaro where shadows are this way and that equally often.

Well, March is here. I just Googled and learned that March Hares are synonymous with madness because it is their mating season...well, well, well; men are mad all seasons.

Hatters are reputed to be as mad as men because, apparently, in the good old days of Lewis Carroll, mercury was used in hat-making, so much so that mercury poisoning is known as "Mad Hatter's Disease".

Here is a curious item from wiki:

"On September 5, 1920, silent movie actress Olive Thomas ingested mercury capsules dissolved in an alcoholic solution at the Hotel Ritz in Paris. There is still controversy over whether it was suicide, or whether she consumed the external preparation by mistake. Her husband, Jack Pickford (the brother of Mary Pickford), had syphilis, and the mercury was used as a treatment of the venereal disease at the time. She died a few days later at the American Hospital in Neuilly."

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