======================================================================
Listen to RKN:
********************************************************************************************************
"...My father next sent me on a similar errand to another friend who had retired from bank service. I did not take to this suggestion with any zest. I had had no misgivings about travelling in a saloon-car as a railway officer, but I had grave ones when I thought of myself as a bank official. I never felt at ease with figures. But I still went to this friend as my father desired another morning, well groomed and properly dressed. This man, though not oily, was also bare-bodied (everyone seemed to be shirtless in Madras). He was fanning himself with a palmyrah leaf, sitting on a swing, while I kept standing. It was difficult to carry on a conversation with him as he approached and receded on his swing. I had to adjust my voice in two pitches to explain my mission and also step back each time the swing came for me. Like the previous gentleman, this man also figured in a group photo of select friends framed and hung in my father's study at Mysore. He also seemed to loathe history and economics and said, 'You must pass some book-keeping and accountancy if you wish to try for a bank job. How does your father spend time nowadays? He used to be such a fop!' He added, 'He wrote to me that he has retired from service now. Now it is up to you young fellows to take over the family responsibilities....'
Well said, I thought. But that precisely is our problem now, sir. Why don't you put your shirt on and do something about it, instead of swinging back and forth in that silly manner advising people?...."
*******************************************************************************************************
I have seen and been on one of those swings that RKN was talking about. They must have been a style statement in the satellite towns of Madras in the 1940s, as common as those bare-bodies. One such swing was right there in the Hall of my Shakespeare Uncle's house in Nellore. It was no mean swing like the take-away garden swings that are in fashion nowadays that can at best seat one at a time. It was massive or so it appeared to me in my childhood. The swing itself was a solid wall-to-wall teak wood plank. Thick and wide. It could hold half a dozen kids and a couple of grownups at a time. And the chains that held it to the fixture in the ceiling were like the elephant chains in the Madras Zoo.
When all the adult males left for their offices we kids used to climb on it and fight among ourselves for precedence. And do tricks with it that I much later found full of intricate physics...well-cited articles appeared in the American Journal of Physics on how a kid can get up on a swing and without touching the ground set it into colossal oscillations by just holding the chain and 'pumping' it...the so-called parametric oscillations and stuff. We could also set the swing into torsional oscillations.
Anyway, we were asked to get down and buzz off when my elder cousins brought their books, got up on the swing, and studied furiously for their exams, all the time swinging to and fro. I guess the swinging motion kept them alert so they wouldn't snooze and fall down like so many stones. Earlier on I was told that brahmin urchins studying had another device to keep them awake while reading their books. They all had their chotis (tufts on the head) and would take a string, tie one end to the choti, and the other end to a nail on the wall...the moment they tend to fall asleep their heads would bend down and they wake up with a start much like the sleepers on rope beds in London that Sam Weller talked about.
In our childhood, reading meant reading aloud...always. Firstly, most books were supposed to be mugged up and read aloud in the first attempt, then read aloud with the book partly closed, and then repeat the damn thing aloud without seeing the book. Maybe it has its genesis in the brahminical tradition of mugging up vedic hymns in the oral tradition...to heaven with the meanings which came much later.
My elder sister, GVD, who did her MBBS while I was doing my MSc at Waltair could never get over this habit. We were staying together in a smallish room and preparing for our exams and she would start reading aloud her fat medical tomes and I would get distracted and ask her to read 'in her mind'. She would say that she can't do it, period. And then I would go mad and carry my bulky Saha & Srivastava to the beach if it is daytime or sit under the gloomy dim wall-lamp outside the house...maybe that is how I lost my eyesight ;-)
She did one more thing much to my delight. All her friends had either bought or borrowed human skeletons for preparing for their anatomy exam viva. But my sister just used to ask me to strip to my codpiece and stand with my legs apart and hands held horizontal like the figures of skeletons we see in the text books...I was skeletal to the extreme with not an ounce of fat anywhere...result of perennial outdoor play in my childhood. And she would go round me with her Gray in one hand and fingering each of my bones in the other. That is how I got to know the Latin names of many body parts....like maxilla, mandible, clavicle, scapula, sternum, patella; not to speak of jejunum.
An year later my younger sister joined us and did her BSc in Botany and Zoology...and she too outdid our elder sister in throaty reading...it was stereo sort of. But I did hear of chordata, coelenterata, and
periplaneta americana:
http://www.ces.csiro.au/aicn/system/c_480.htm
======================================================================
Listen to RKN:
********************************************************************************************************
"...My father next sent me on a similar errand to another friend who had retired from bank service. I did not take to this suggestion with any zest. I had had no misgivings about travelling in a saloon-car as a railway officer, but I had grave ones when I thought of myself as a bank official. I never felt at ease with figures. But I still went to this friend as my father desired another morning, well groomed and properly dressed. This man, though not oily, was also bare-bodied (everyone seemed to be shirtless in Madras). He was fanning himself with a palmyrah leaf, sitting on a swing, while I kept standing. It was difficult to carry on a conversation with him as he approached and receded on his swing. I had to adjust my voice in two pitches to explain my mission and also step back each time the swing came for me. Like the previous gentleman, this man also figured in a group photo of select friends framed and hung in my father's study at Mysore. He also seemed to loathe history and economics and said, 'You must pass some book-keeping and accountancy if you wish to try for a bank job. How does your father spend time nowadays? He used to be such a fop!' He added, 'He wrote to me that he has retired from service now. Now it is up to you young fellows to take over the family responsibilities....'
Well said, I thought. But that precisely is our problem now, sir. Why don't you put your shirt on and do something about it, instead of swinging back and forth in that silly manner advising people?...."
*******************************************************************************************************
I have seen and been on one of those swings that RKN was talking about. They must have been a style statement in the satellite towns of Madras in the 1940s, as common as those bare-bodies. One such swing was right there in the Hall of my Shakespeare Uncle's house in Nellore. It was no mean swing like the take-away garden swings that are in fashion nowadays that can at best seat one at a time. It was massive or so it appeared to me in my childhood. The swing itself was a solid wall-to-wall teak wood plank. Thick and wide. It could hold half a dozen kids and a couple of grownups at a time. And the chains that held it to the fixture in the ceiling were like the elephant chains in the Madras Zoo.
When all the adult males left for their offices we kids used to climb on it and fight among ourselves for precedence. And do tricks with it that I much later found full of intricate physics...well-cited articles appeared in the American Journal of Physics on how a kid can get up on a swing and without touching the ground set it into colossal oscillations by just holding the chain and 'pumping' it...the so-called parametric oscillations and stuff. We could also set the swing into torsional oscillations.
Anyway, we were asked to get down and buzz off when my elder cousins brought their books, got up on the swing, and studied furiously for their exams, all the time swinging to and fro. I guess the swinging motion kept them alert so they wouldn't snooze and fall down like so many stones. Earlier on I was told that brahmin urchins studying had another device to keep them awake while reading their books. They all had their chotis (tufts on the head) and would take a string, tie one end to the choti, and the other end to a nail on the wall...the moment they tend to fall asleep their heads would bend down and they wake up with a start much like the sleepers on rope beds in London that Sam Weller talked about.
In our childhood, reading meant reading aloud...always. Firstly, most books were supposed to be mugged up and read aloud in the first attempt, then read aloud with the book partly closed, and then repeat the damn thing aloud without seeing the book. Maybe it has its genesis in the brahminical tradition of mugging up vedic hymns in the oral tradition...to heaven with the meanings which came much later.
My elder sister, GVD, who did her MBBS while I was doing my MSc at Waltair could never get over this habit. We were staying together in a smallish room and preparing for our exams and she would start reading aloud her fat medical tomes and I would get distracted and ask her to read 'in her mind'. She would say that she can't do it, period. And then I would go mad and carry my bulky Saha & Srivastava to the beach if it is daytime or sit under the gloomy dim wall-lamp outside the house...maybe that is how I lost my eyesight ;-)
She did one more thing much to my delight. All her friends had either bought or borrowed human skeletons for preparing for their anatomy exam viva. But my sister just used to ask me to strip to my codpiece and stand with my legs apart and hands held horizontal like the figures of skeletons we see in the text books...I was skeletal to the extreme with not an ounce of fat anywhere...result of perennial outdoor play in my childhood. And she would go round me with her Gray in one hand and fingering each of my bones in the other. That is how I got to know the Latin names of many body parts....like maxilla, mandible, clavicle, scapula, sternum, patella; not to speak of jejunum.
An year later my younger sister joined us and did her BSc in Botany and Zoology...and she too outdid our elder sister in throaty reading...it was stereo sort of. But I did hear of chordata, coelenterata, and
periplaneta americana:
http://www.ces.csiro.au/aicn/system/c_480.htm
Much later, my elder cousin, GVR (of the previous blog) was reading about mega lodha lodha kinesis...he was into Geology.
I guess Physics escaped lightly from the clutches of Latin nomenclature. But Math did even better...it took up simple English words and gave them complicated meanings...like field, group, ring, set...perhaps everyone was scared of math and they wanted to attract students with simplistic names; and then the students discovered to their dismay the perfidy of mathematicians...
Here is the wiki-definition of a 'ring':
A ring is a set R equipped with two binary operations + : R × R → R and · : R × R → R (where × denotes the Cartesian product), called addition and multiplication. To qualify as a ring, the set and two operations, (R, +, · ), must satisfy the following requirements known as the ring axioms.[4]
- (R, +) is required to be an abelian group under addition:
-
1. Closure under addition. For all a, b in R, the result of the operation a + b is also in R.c[›] 2. Associativity of addition. For all a, b, c in R, the equation (a + b) + c = a + (b + c) holds. 3. Existence of additive identity. There exists an element 0 in R, such that for all elements a in R, the equation 0 + a = a + 0 = a holds. 4. Existence of additive inverse. For each a in R, there exists an element b in R such that a + b = b + a = 0 5. Commutativity of addition. For all a, b in R, the equation a + b = b + a holds.
- (R, ·) is required to be a monoid under multiplication:
-
1. Closure under multiplication. For all a, b in R, the result of the operation a · b is also in R.c[›] 2. Associativity of multiplication. For all a, b, c in R, the equation (a · b) · c = a · (b · c) holds. 3. Existence of multiplicative identity.a[›] There exists an element 1 in R, such that for all elements a in R, the equation 1 · a = a · 1 = a holds.
- The distributive laws:
-
1. For all a, b and c in R, the equation a · (b + c) = (a · b) + (a · c) holds. 2. For all a, b and c in R, the equation (a + b) · c = (a · c) + (b · c) holds.
This definition assumes that a binary operation on R is a function defined on R×R with values in R. Therefore, for any a and b in R, the addition a + b and the product a · b are elements of R.
*********************************************************************************************************
I thought so....
======================================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment