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The first Table I had to mug up was of course the dreaded Multiplication Table. When I entered Class VII, Father would call me as he prepared to sit down for his evening sandhyavandanam...a different kind of rote in which he didn't seem to have much heart although he taught it to me religiously...nowadays I mutter it of a morning in my bed with spurious actions to the delight of Ishani.
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I had to stand by him with folded hands and start the drill from 'Two Ones are Two' till 'Nineteen Tens are Hundred Ninety'. My mind was never in math and it drifted midway to what was for dinner and I would goof up and get a rap and had to start again all over. Tough guys these HMs. After the whole thing was somehow over, he would take a viva and ask like "What is Eighteen Sevens?". And I had to start inwardly from 'Eighteen Ones are Eighteen' and would be scolded for not being prompt enough...he knew the answer and expected that I too should know it upfront...he forgot that I was just a kid.
I recall a new kid on the block, Prasada Rao, who astonished all of us with his math prowess since his father...must have been a Bigger Bully...made him recite up to 'Nineteen Twenties are whatever it is'. It is a different matter that he failed in Quarterly Math which I scraped just through.
By and by I arrived at my University and the first thing we were asked to buy and bring to our Phy Labs was the Clark's Mathematical and Physical Tables. It was a thin imported booklet that had to last all of five years and it did, although much soiled by perennial thumbing. It began with four-figure logarithms and antilogarithms. And we used them for multiplication and division all the time. We became experts. Log was ok but Antilog was not easy...
Becoming experts in using a thing doesn't mean understanding it. Much like our nukkad marwari shopkeeper here is an expert with his pocket calculator...and is lost and forlorn without it...looks like his dad was not the devil of a HM.
This was brought home to me with a thud when I was visiting home from IIT KGP a couple of decades later and my youngest sister who was doing her M.A. (Economics) asked me abruptly how log tables work and what precisely antilogs are...I had to improvise an answer impromptu.
And then Clark went on to sines, cosines and tangents and what not and to the Universal Physical Constants. But they were sketchy and very British.
So, in our fourth year we were asked to buy the nascent home-made Seshadri Tables which were twice as bulky and half as expensive. The beauty of Seshadri was that he gave us things like the viscosity of castor oil (made in India) all the way from 20 deg C to 45 deg C. And that info was very much needed in our Rotating Viscometer Expt (I landed it in my Finals). If I recall right, the damn thing varies by as much as a factor of 2...and Vizagh was hot and humid in summer...Clark won't help at all.
And then we entered the Spectroscopy Lab in our Final Year M.Sc. That was a life-altering experience. We had six-hour experiments starting from focusing the used research spectrograph, going to the dark room to load the photographic plate and getting the iron arc and carbon arc ready for comparison and clicking the photographs of line and band spectra and washing and fixing the plate in the dark room and measuring and calculating wavenumbers up to seven figures and making up the Deslandres table...
That needed 7-figure Log Tables...
They came in a book of about 300 pages. They just had logarithms...don't expect 7-figure Antilog Tables...paagal ho? The antilog operation had to be cooked up reading the log tables backwards...
Phew!!!
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