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The first ever medical implement I saw in my life was at the tender age of 4. My Father bought it and used to keep it at a height two or three feet above mine...thinking it was safe from me.
He didn't read William James' Principles of Psychology:
Jimmy distinguishes living things from nonliving not by physiology but psychology. It is a different matter that Freud and his ilk maintained that there is nothing called physiology...every damn thing is psychology...including why water flows downwards and air goes upwards...that is, if you are not suffering from a certain class of digestive disorders, in which case, the direction of flow of water and wind is reversed...sorry!
Jimmy says that nonliving things like a bar magnet and needle don't have a 'will' of their own. When a magnet is brought anywhere near the needle, the needle feels a fatal attraction to the magnet and runs towards it and gets stuck in its embrace. But if you interpose a paper between the two, the needle is fooled and won't know how to overcome the obstacle placed by her mom.
On the other hand take, say, Romeo and Juliet. Julie's fatal attraction is as pronounced as in the nonliving needle and she runs in and gets stuck to Romey. But, mark this, if you build a wall of six feet or less between them, she is not flummoxed, but tries to climb the wall and jump down and in the process breaks her legs.
This proves (according to Jimmy) unequivocally that Juliet is a living being much like those jumping frogs that used to make my life hell in the bathrooms of Qrs B-140 at IIT KGP. Half way through my holy intestinal ablutions, I used to notice a (female, since she is pink) jumping frog stuck like a leech to the side wall, making preparatory movements of her hind legs as if taking aim:
Coming to my Father's prize possession, he used to call it his Hick's Thermometer. It was a slender object asking to be broken and kept in an even more breakable hard plastic case.
My relations with this ghastly thing were always clumsy in every sense of the word. As soon as Father brought it out and kept it on his table preparing to take my temperature and turns back to get water to cleanse it (he was finicky about infections and always suspected that folks with dreaded diseases like typhoid were using it behind his back), it would roll down any which way since the floors those days were even more uneven than my teeth now.
So, as I watched its downfall with glee, and did nothing to prevent it, it would fall down and break into a fudge of glass and mercury. And all hell would break loose when he returned and looked for it. And squarely blame me. I used to protest vehemently but he used to believe that inaction is as punishable as action (karma vs akarma). And thrash me till Mother came down from the kitchen and took Father to task for hitting a sick child.
I was very astute in jurisprudence even at that tender age, because, I recalled that last time when the Jintan fell down from his hands and broke into two like Humpty Dumpty, Father didn't hit himself but blamed my mom for sneezing just when he was taking it out from its case...and I saw that there is no justice for kids and wives in this Man's World.
And promised myself that I would never hit my toddler son for breaking my things...it is a different matter that once he tried to lift a full glass bottle of Mango Pickle (in my wife's absence).
Nowadays however the boot is on the other leg...whenever anything breakable (like that full bottle of Dabur's Honey) falls and (invariably) breaks with a soul-shattering crash, my son of a gun lolling in his shower takes it for granted that I am the culprit and shouts that old folks should keep themselves to themselves and not meddle with glass bottles...and I wink at Ishani like that chap who volunteered to be guillotined for love in the Tale of Two Cities (London and Paris...not Hyderabad and Secunderabad).
Who said, "There is no Justice in this World"?
...Posted by Ishani
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The first ever medical implement I saw in my life was at the tender age of 4. My Father bought it and used to keep it at a height two or three feet above mine...thinking it was safe from me.
He didn't read William James' Principles of Psychology:
Jimmy distinguishes living things from nonliving not by physiology but psychology. It is a different matter that Freud and his ilk maintained that there is nothing called physiology...every damn thing is psychology...including why water flows downwards and air goes upwards...that is, if you are not suffering from a certain class of digestive disorders, in which case, the direction of flow of water and wind is reversed...sorry!
Jimmy says that nonliving things like a bar magnet and needle don't have a 'will' of their own. When a magnet is brought anywhere near the needle, the needle feels a fatal attraction to the magnet and runs towards it and gets stuck in its embrace. But if you interpose a paper between the two, the needle is fooled and won't know how to overcome the obstacle placed by her mom.
On the other hand take, say, Romeo and Juliet. Julie's fatal attraction is as pronounced as in the nonliving needle and she runs in and gets stuck to Romey. But, mark this, if you build a wall of six feet or less between them, she is not flummoxed, but tries to climb the wall and jump down and in the process breaks her legs.
This proves (according to Jimmy) unequivocally that Juliet is a living being much like those jumping frogs that used to make my life hell in the bathrooms of Qrs B-140 at IIT KGP. Half way through my holy intestinal ablutions, I used to notice a (female, since she is pink) jumping frog stuck like a leech to the side wall, making preparatory movements of her hind legs as if taking aim:
Coming to my Father's prize possession, he used to call it his Hick's Thermometer. It was a slender object asking to be broken and kept in an even more breakable hard plastic case.
My relations with this ghastly thing were always clumsy in every sense of the word. As soon as Father brought it out and kept it on his table preparing to take my temperature and turns back to get water to cleanse it (he was finicky about infections and always suspected that folks with dreaded diseases like typhoid were using it behind his back), it would roll down any which way since the floors those days were even more uneven than my teeth now.
So, as I watched its downfall with glee, and did nothing to prevent it, it would fall down and break into a fudge of glass and mercury. And all hell would break loose when he returned and looked for it. And squarely blame me. I used to protest vehemently but he used to believe that inaction is as punishable as action (karma vs akarma). And thrash me till Mother came down from the kitchen and took Father to task for hitting a sick child.
I was very astute in jurisprudence even at that tender age, because, I recalled that last time when the Jintan fell down from his hands and broke into two like Humpty Dumpty, Father didn't hit himself but blamed my mom for sneezing just when he was taking it out from its case...and I saw that there is no justice for kids and wives in this Man's World.
And promised myself that I would never hit my toddler son for breaking my things...it is a different matter that once he tried to lift a full glass bottle of Mango Pickle (in my wife's absence).
Nowadays however the boot is on the other leg...whenever anything breakable (like that full bottle of Dabur's Honey) falls and (invariably) breaks with a soul-shattering crash, my son of a gun lolling in his shower takes it for granted that I am the culprit and shouts that old folks should keep themselves to themselves and not meddle with glass bottles...and I wink at Ishani like that chap who volunteered to be guillotined for love in the Tale of Two Cities (London and Paris...not Hyderabad and Secunderabad).
Who said, "There is no Justice in this World"?
...Posted by Ishani
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