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When we were schoolkids we thought that everything beautiful was also symmetric.
The great monuments we saw in our picture-books were perfectly symmetrical... Charminar, Taj Mahal, Victoria Memorial, Red Fort...
Talking of Red Fort, I am reminded of the quip by a viceroy who was against shifting the British capital in India from Calcutta to Delhi that Delhi is the graveyard of empires...it turned out to be the graveyard of his British Empire alright...and the nascent chai-walah proclaims that he would single-handed turn it into the graveyard of the latest Empire...the latest buzz being that its reigning queen is richer than Nizam ever was...
When we came to our fifth form we had this grainy picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa which was certainly not symmetrical. It was intended to portray some principle of junior physics. But of course it was intended to be symmetrical like our own Qutb Minar whose name may soon be changed to Garuda Dhwaja if everything goes right.
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The great monuments we saw in our picture-books were perfectly symmetrical... Charminar, Taj Mahal, Victoria Memorial, Red Fort...
Talking of Red Fort, I am reminded of the quip by a viceroy who was against shifting the British capital in India from Calcutta to Delhi that Delhi is the graveyard of empires...it turned out to be the graveyard of his British Empire alright...and the nascent chai-walah proclaims that he would single-handed turn it into the graveyard of the latest Empire...the latest buzz being that its reigning queen is richer than Nizam ever was...
When we came to our fifth form we had this grainy picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa which was certainly not symmetrical. It was intended to portray some principle of junior physics. But of course it was intended to be symmetrical like our own Qutb Minar whose name may soon be changed to Garuda Dhwaja if everything goes right.
Qutb who, and why? You must have seen good old Brahmi inscriptions on it:
...The Iron Pillar in the courtyard bears an inscription in Sanskrit in
Brahmi script of the 4th century AD. According to this inscription, the
pillar was set up as a Vishnudhvaja (standard of Lord Vishnu) on the
hill known as Krishnapada in memory of a mighty king named Chandra. A
deep socket on the top of the ornate capital indicates that an image of
Garuda was probably affixed to it....The Qutub Minar is itself built on the ruins of the Lal Kot, the Red Citadel in the city of Dhillika, the capital of the Tomars and the Chauhans, the last Hindu rulers of Delhi.[9] One engraving on the Qutub Minar reads, "Shri Vishwakarma prasade rachita" (Conceived with the grace of Vishwakarma)...wiki
Let our Archeology Department dig it up and find out...maybe a few tons of gold are buried there...which would mightily please our big boss who, we all hope, would revise our misjudged pensions upwards before it is too late...delayed justice being denied justice...as you know I have already lost my Family Pension to cervical cancer.
Talking of symmetry, we thought at school that Nature is replete with symmetry. Certainly rainbow is the blurred arc of the most perfect circle one ever saw. And umpteen flowers like the lotus and the rose that excel in their inexplicable symmetry.
Higher education spoiled all those romantic ideas.
We were taught that there is something called cis-trans sort of isomerism, and sugar molecules that we drank with sweet pleasure were really asymmetric...something insane called chirality...apparently like our left and right hands which can't be superposed...whoever wanted to superpose them? Clapping and doing namaste would look ugly if you superpose your hands instead of juxtaposing them.
We could forget chemistry which is an ugly subject and turn to physics that was supposed to be beautiful.
But then in our university we read that the pinnacle of beauty called Maxwell Equations were rather asymmetric. There is a point charge but no point magnet.
And then as we dug deep into physics we came to know of a thing called symmetry-breaking which is all over particle physics and solid state physics.
The epitome of our achievement, the so-called God Particle, sits at the pinnacle of Particle Physics which is anything but beautiful. It is so ugly mathematically that my Guru, SDM, refused to touch it with a barge pole. And now I read that our Jagat-Guru, Hawking, is bemoaning the discovery of the so-called God Particle and wishes secretly that it turns out to be a bloomer of wild experimentation gone wrong.
Newborn babies are so symmetric that their moms in most parts of India break this symmetry by pocking their faces with black dots on one side...left if female and right if male...a practice which is revived when they grow up to be brides and grooms sitting side by side on their wedding pedestals.
In our childhood we thought that a girl child is beautiful if the parting of her hair is precisely in the middle.
But of course we were wrong.
The most beautiful girl child, according to her doting grandpa, has it on one side:
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