Lung Power

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"We spend the next few hours following the croaking. A loud cackle takes us close to a pond where we are surrounded by Bombay night frogs. The males croak loudly after sunset in the hope of finding a mate. They create a huge bubble on their necks, which helps to amplify the sounds. Females tend to favour the loudest males."

....National Geographic Traveller

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Ha! That is the value of lung power. 

On the first night of every monsoon I used to hear, on my late evening walks around the IIT KGP Campus, a sudden uproar of frogs singing loudly in absolute disharmony near the Tech Market Swamp. And wonder where all these frogs went the rest of the year...like Holden Caulfield wondered where all the ducks went when the lagoon froze.

And within a few days every frog in the Campus fell as silent as students in the Exam Halls.

To croak croak and croak again heralding the advent of the next monsoon.

I read that the bull frog makes such a terrific croak because it emits its call not from its throat but from its resonant ear-drum:





  http://www.barransclass.com/phys1090/circus/BancroftK/BancroftK.html


For a long time I thought that jungle is the noisiest place. But I was hopelessly wrong. Jungles, I learned from Jim Corbett, that are not molested by human interference, are the most silent of all...it is us who make such a terrific noise all the time. The reason is simple...every living creature in the jungle is food for some other life-form in the food-chain. So, stealth is as necessary for the predator as for the predated ;-)

And it is rarely that animals fight...except in occasional turf wars or mate battles. But these are rare since 'might is right' there and every animal knows its place in the might hierarchy...it is with us that 'sleight is right'...

Very rarely animals do get angry when molested and, when they do, Jim writes:

"When tigers roar with anger it is a very terrifying sound"

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When we reach man at the top of the food chain, lung power goes a long way, though not all the way.

UNO, with its captive audience, has been the venue for lung power at its best.

Gaddafi, allotted 15 minutes, spoke for an hour and a half non-stop. But he was a novice compared to Castro who spoke for 4 hours and 29 minutes.

And Castro is a moth compared to our own star-speaker, Krishna Menon, who spoke for nearly eight hours...and fainted at the end of his speech.

And Krishna Menon was not a Dictator like Gaddafi or Castro...he was from the world's largest democracy.

Hey! Krishna!!! You are nowhere compared to ancient Greeks and modern Turks:

"Among the most famous of long speeches is that made by the Athenian politician Pericles at a public funeral for those who had first fallen in the Peloponnesian War. He took the opportunity not only to praise the dead, but Athens itself. 

More recently, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, delivered an epic oratory in 1927. Not for him a speech measured in mere minutes - he spoke for 36 hours and 31 minutes over six days"

And long speeches of Dictators have to be followed by standing ovations. Stalin was keen on it:


 

In the book Gulag Archipelago, author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounted how a fellow prisoner in the USSR labour camps told how he came to be arrested. At a local party conference, someone toasted Stalin and "stormy applause, rising to an ovation", broke out. Even though the great leader was absent, it continued. "But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching... However, who would dare be the first to stop? 

"Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a business-like expression and sat down in his seat." 

That same night, he was arrested.

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8272473.stm

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At the Physics Department of IIT KGP during my youth, Prof Bidhan Mohanty took the cake for lung power. He was not only loud in his formidable Lecture Classes but also in the First Year Lab of which he was Lab-in-Charge for decades. As soon as the 60 students filled up the Lab Space leisurely chatting, his voice started and rose to a crescendo banging them in printable abuses on and on and lecturing them about the Lab Protocol. Prof BND, who was his junior in the Lab used to refer to him:

"Yama Raj"

Next to him was Prof RCB who also had a tremendous audio amplitude. The trouble with him was that his amplitude never varied and was independent of the strength of the Class...he used to lecture to 10 students in the tiny C-235 as if he were speaking to 60 in the Raman Auditorium. And, I was in the next room sitting for years and had to run away to the Canteen for the nonce.

Lung Power is somewhat genetic. My Father was a much-fared HM of his School mostly for the terrific scolding he used to dole out to his Teachers who trespassed his Rules & Regulations, Dress Code, Punctuality, Discipline etc. When their Teachers used to fear him, it was easy for the students to cower whenever they saw him...killing the cat on the first night...

But in the Class Room he spoke gently enough, for, none dared to make noise there. And the Class strength never exceeded 30 during my time in his School.

And I acquired from him the necessary lung power and loudness.

But I had a tough time in my First Lecture Class at IIT KGP. It was like this:

During my first year there in 1965, our HoD looked at me and said:

"You look so puny...take only tutorials and labs this year"

And so the maximum number of students to whom I had to talk in the Tuts was 12.

And next year he dumped me suddenly into the First Year B. Tech Lecture Hall, F-133. That year there was a confusion in the Admissions because the 4-year B. Tech was being replaced by the 5-year B.Tech for which admissions were allowed after Class XI itself. So, the Phy Class had students from both the streams and I found when I entered the Lecture Hall that it was packed to capacity exceeding 100 students.

And I felt my knees wobbling.

And I postponed the ritual of taking Roll Call to the end.

And it was pandemonium and nobody noticed me taking the stage...they all thought it was one of them pranking with the black board. And my repeated shouts:

"Silence Please!"

were heeded by none. 

So, I took up a chalk piece and started drawing the diagram of the Torsion Balance Experiment for  Coulomb's Law:



 
 


 http://www.studyphysics.ca/30/coulomb.pdf

And started to explain how it goes.

But nothing happened...no one was in a mood to listen and the shouting continued.

Then a miracle happened.

A Sardarjee from the last bench (JSB), twice my size, walked up to the stage and turned to the Class and shouted:

"Stop talking! I want to listen to what this Sir is saying!"

It worked like a charm.

Everyone fell silent to know what was happening.

Then my genes started working...And I picked up my decibels...

And never looked back...


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