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Everyone has heard of Murphy's Law:
"If a thing can go wrong, it will"
The canonical example of Murphy's Law is supposed to be this:
"If a piece of toast falls down on the floor from your hand, it will always land on the buttered side"
I remember seeing an erudite article in the European Journal of Physics, full of aerodynamical equations, which proved why the slice of bread always falls on its buttered side...something to do with viscous friction, if not quantum mechanics.
Of course it is all wrong. You only notice it when it falls on the buttered side.
In any case, I don't wish to take chances nowadays...bread and butter being so costly. So, I butter my slice of bread on both sides. And whenever it chooses to fall down on the floor from my limp hands, it can't decide what to do and so falls on one of its edges and stands erect till I pick it up and eat it.
Talking of picking up eatables from the floor and eating them on the sly while you are midway through it, I happen to be the global expert. It has to do with my childhood training. Father was a poor brahmin teacher with seven voracious kids and so each morsel of rice and bit and piece of vegetable was precious. So, when one of us dropped a bhendi piece on the floor during our community eating, Father would roar:
"Pick it up and eat it! Don't waste food!"
And would recite the shlok:
"Annam parabrahma swaroopam" (food is the very incarnation of God)
That training was good for us...we became immune by and by to the bacteria on our floors. Nowadays of course folks are very health-conscious and sterilized and rebuke their kids when they drop their cut pieces of delicious mango fruit on the floor:
"Throw it away...don't eat it!"
Of course little Ishani is averse to do any such foolish thing. So, when her parents are around, she passes on the crestfallen mango piece to me and asks me to throw it in the dustbin, with a wink...she knows that I will never do it...but would conceal it in my palm till her parents are out of sight, when she would come to me asking for it.
Not that I don't believe in Murphy's law entirely.
Hundreds are the times when I stand in the queue for buying a railway ticket waiting and waiting and waiting; and when my turn comes at last, the vendor behind the pigeon hole shuts up his window and places this board on it:
"Lunch Time"
And whenever I stand in line in front of the postal clerk to buy a Rs 5 stamp, the clerk would find all his stamps exhausted whenever my turn came. And he would go into some recess to fetch new stamps and would take half an hour for the job.
And whenever I am in a hurry and succeed in at last buying the ticket for our MMTS (local train) and run to the platform, I would see the damn train speeding away from me by a few yards.
But as I said, these are just the examples I remember bitterly...there would be thousands of instances when things went swimmingly...and I took them for granted.
And when things appeared to go very very wrong, they ultimately turn out to be for our good....it could have been worse.
When I was just 8, Father, in his unwisdom, thought that I was a whiz-kid and a child prodigy. So, he admitted me to the First Form in his school through the backdoor. And amazingly I was just 13 when I passed my school-final and 14 when I finished my Pre-University. And as it happened, I stood first in the entire University in the group MPE (Maths, Physical Sciences and English) which mattered for admissions in the various engg branches at our Univ. Like Abou Ben Adhem, my name was topping the list.
But against my name there was a * and the remark:
*...under-aged...not eligible for admission
Apparently the minimum age was 15. And I cried buckets since my classmates who were giant-sized and two or three years older to me got admitted to Mechanical Engg although their names were 40th in the Schindler's List.
But now I am so happy...I would never have been a good engineer what with my trait of woolgathering...cranes designed by me would have broken down and bridges would have collapsed like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
I was designed to teach Physics at IIT KGP...the place and the subject suited me to a tee...the most laid-back IIT and the most useless subject.
If you wish to see why Murphy's Law is all wrong, you have only to just consider Life on this planet which we call 'Home..Home" like the ET.
A million things which could have gone wrong just went absolutely right to bring me into being for perennial blogging...like the size of the earth, its inclination, distance form the sun, water and air on its surface...the latest estimate is 1 in 1000000000.
There was this story in Chandamama in our childhood:
This king used to go for hunting with his minister on weekends. One day, the king cut his finger while embarking on their trip. And his minister said:
"It's all for our good"
And the king got wild and imprisoned him.
And the minster said:
"It's all for our good"
And the king went alone on his hunting after his chief surgeon applied a Band-Aid to his finger.
And he lost his way and was caught by a band of cannibals who had the custom of offering their victims to their deity before cooking and spicing and eating them. And they were happy to find a fulsome king in their trap and carried him on. But their chief priest turned him away as unfit to offer to their fussy deity since he was unwholesome...not kosher...with a bandaged finger.
So he was released and found his way back home and went to his minister to say that he has seen the light...he would have been cooked and eaten up had he not cut his finger.
And asked his minister why he said that it was all to the good when he was imprisoned. And the wise minister replied:
"Otherwise I would have accompanied you and the cannibals would have offered me to their deity as the next best...a wholesome chap fit to eat"
Murphy's Law, my foot!
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Everyone has heard of Murphy's Law:
"If a thing can go wrong, it will"
The canonical example of Murphy's Law is supposed to be this:
"If a piece of toast falls down on the floor from your hand, it will always land on the buttered side"
I remember seeing an erudite article in the European Journal of Physics, full of aerodynamical equations, which proved why the slice of bread always falls on its buttered side...something to do with viscous friction, if not quantum mechanics.
Of course it is all wrong. You only notice it when it falls on the buttered side.
In any case, I don't wish to take chances nowadays...bread and butter being so costly. So, I butter my slice of bread on both sides. And whenever it chooses to fall down on the floor from my limp hands, it can't decide what to do and so falls on one of its edges and stands erect till I pick it up and eat it.
Talking of picking up eatables from the floor and eating them on the sly while you are midway through it, I happen to be the global expert. It has to do with my childhood training. Father was a poor brahmin teacher with seven voracious kids and so each morsel of rice and bit and piece of vegetable was precious. So, when one of us dropped a bhendi piece on the floor during our community eating, Father would roar:
"Pick it up and eat it! Don't waste food!"
And would recite the shlok:
"Annam parabrahma swaroopam" (food is the very incarnation of God)
That training was good for us...we became immune by and by to the bacteria on our floors. Nowadays of course folks are very health-conscious and sterilized and rebuke their kids when they drop their cut pieces of delicious mango fruit on the floor:
"Throw it away...don't eat it!"
Of course little Ishani is averse to do any such foolish thing. So, when her parents are around, she passes on the crestfallen mango piece to me and asks me to throw it in the dustbin, with a wink...she knows that I will never do it...but would conceal it in my palm till her parents are out of sight, when she would come to me asking for it.
Not that I don't believe in Murphy's law entirely.
Hundreds are the times when I stand in the queue for buying a railway ticket waiting and waiting and waiting; and when my turn comes at last, the vendor behind the pigeon hole shuts up his window and places this board on it:
"Lunch Time"
And whenever I stand in line in front of the postal clerk to buy a Rs 5 stamp, the clerk would find all his stamps exhausted whenever my turn came. And he would go into some recess to fetch new stamps and would take half an hour for the job.
And whenever I am in a hurry and succeed in at last buying the ticket for our MMTS (local train) and run to the platform, I would see the damn train speeding away from me by a few yards.
But as I said, these are just the examples I remember bitterly...there would be thousands of instances when things went swimmingly...and I took them for granted.
And when things appeared to go very very wrong, they ultimately turn out to be for our good....it could have been worse.
When I was just 8, Father, in his unwisdom, thought that I was a whiz-kid and a child prodigy. So, he admitted me to the First Form in his school through the backdoor. And amazingly I was just 13 when I passed my school-final and 14 when I finished my Pre-University. And as it happened, I stood first in the entire University in the group MPE (Maths, Physical Sciences and English) which mattered for admissions in the various engg branches at our Univ. Like Abou Ben Adhem, my name was topping the list.
But against my name there was a * and the remark:
*...under-aged...not eligible for admission
Apparently the minimum age was 15. And I cried buckets since my classmates who were giant-sized and two or three years older to me got admitted to Mechanical Engg although their names were 40th in the Schindler's List.
But now I am so happy...I would never have been a good engineer what with my trait of woolgathering...cranes designed by me would have broken down and bridges would have collapsed like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
I was designed to teach Physics at IIT KGP...the place and the subject suited me to a tee...the most laid-back IIT and the most useless subject.
If you wish to see why Murphy's Law is all wrong, you have only to just consider Life on this planet which we call 'Home..Home" like the ET.
A million things which could have gone wrong just went absolutely right to bring me into being for perennial blogging...like the size of the earth, its inclination, distance form the sun, water and air on its surface...the latest estimate is 1 in 1000000000.
There was this story in Chandamama in our childhood:
This king used to go for hunting with his minister on weekends. One day, the king cut his finger while embarking on their trip. And his minister said:
"It's all for our good"
And the king got wild and imprisoned him.
And the minster said:
"It's all for our good"
And the king went alone on his hunting after his chief surgeon applied a Band-Aid to his finger.
And he lost his way and was caught by a band of cannibals who had the custom of offering their victims to their deity before cooking and spicing and eating them. And they were happy to find a fulsome king in their trap and carried him on. But their chief priest turned him away as unfit to offer to their fussy deity since he was unwholesome...not kosher...with a bandaged finger.
So he was released and found his way back home and went to his minister to say that he has seen the light...he would have been cooked and eaten up had he not cut his finger.
And asked his minister why he said that it was all to the good when he was imprisoned. And the wise minister replied:
"Otherwise I would have accompanied you and the cannibals would have offered me to their deity as the next best...a wholesome chap fit to eat"
Murphy's Law, my foot!
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1 comment:
REVERXE MURPHY LAW: (GPS uvaacha)
If good has to happen, it will !
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