Triads

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  http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/exhibitions/lerner/images/9_11445.jpg

—Here is another remark made for his especial benefit.—There is a natural
tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together in _triads_, as
I have heard them called,—thus: He was honorable, courteous, and brave;
she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous.  Dr. Johnson is famous for
this; I think it was Bulwer who said you could separate a paper in the
“Rambler” into three distinct essays.  Many of our writers show the same
tendency,—my friend, the Professor, especially.  Some think it is in
humble imitation of Johnson,—some that it is for the sake of the stately
sound only.  I don’t think they get to the bottom of it.  It is, I
suspect, an instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a
thought or image with the _three dimensions_ that belong to every
solid,—an unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth,
and thickness.  It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it,
and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it.  But mind
this: the more we observe and study, the wider we find the range of the
automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind, and morals, and the
narrower the limits of the self-determining conscious movement.

...Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

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There is surely an element of truth in the prevalence of the number 3 in our lives as our Autocrat pointed out above, although I guess his reasoning about the 3 dimensions we live in is rather specious for physics folks. We learned early to consider time as the fourth dimension and later the number of dimensions bloated to as many as 33 if not more.

The young man, Larry, in Maugham's Razor's Edge, wandered all over the world before he landed in Bombay in search of inner peace and happiness. And took a boat to the Elephanta Caves. There he looked at the sculpted figure of Trimurti, the 3 gods of Hinduism. And was told they represent Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. And was enchanted and stayed back in India for 12 years in an ashram till he was satisfied he got the meaning of his life.

The Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost is common to Christianity too. 

One can cite hundreds of such triads in use...like our "3 Idiots"...the fourth is often claimed to be their inventor...bitterly.

The first 3 that bugged me was the Rule of Three (Trirasika Sutram) that my Father, the HM, taught me. I was happy that I learned it fast till someone told me that it is fallacious...sometimes the said Rule of 3 involved (larger/smaller) while at other times (smaller/larger). I gave it up for good.

And in our Matriculation and other University Exams there were three classes of passes: First Class, Second Class and Third Class. No one ever got First Class in Arts Subjects where a High Second Class was the highest to aspire.

And in trains during Mahatma Gandhi's time, as everyone knows, there were 3 classes, First, Second and Third. Later there was an Inter Class too. We always traveled in the Third Class, like Gandhiji. And we had to fight for our seats with hammer and tongs. The latecomers had to stand all the way. Once however, my MD Uncle in Vizagh got a telegram that he was promoted to the coveted post of Professor in the Kurnool Medical College. His joy knew no bounds since he was the youngest to achieve that feat then. And he packed his bag in five minutes, blew a kiss to his wife, and ran up the Maharanipet Hill to catch a rickshaw and board the Mail that was to leave in a few minutes. I was struck dumb and asked my aunt how her hubby can travel all the way from Vizagh to Kurnool standing as a latecomer. And she laughed and replied:

"Of course he will go by the First Class"

That was an eye-opener to me.

In our Fifth Form Math book there was this topic called Geometry that involved all sorts of theorems, proof, riders, constructions, QED etc. It was all weird. And I was told that it was enough to mug up the proof of the Pythagoras Theorem to pass in the exam. Which I did...it was fairly lengthy. But what came in the question paper was the inverse of the damn theorem. And coming home I discovered that the proof of the inverse was only 1/4 as long as the direct thing. Triangles were a bugbear...there were all sorts of them like the equilateral, right angle, isosceles, with their incircles and outcircles and what not.  

But the real triangle we saw everywhere on display on hoardings on our streets in the 1960s was the Red Triangle. I was then too young to follow the meaning of Family Planning that became a religion to our Nehru administration...till his grandson imposed it on the unwilling during the infamous Emergency. This 'forced vasectomy' on thousands of young men resulted in the dethronement of Indira Gandhi who recovered her throne by and by at the expense of those who couldn't recover their virility...the inverse of this theorem was not as simple as the direct.

By when I was able to understand what Family Planning was, it was renamed Family Welfare...old rubbers in new packets.

I asked many what the meaning of the infamous Red Triangle was...why triangle, why Red, and why Inverted? No one could tell me the right answer. Everyone was equally baffled. Some came up with nauseatingly creative explanations like that the two upper corners meant the father and the mother and the bottom corner stood for their child. But I told them that there are two kids in the blurb...son and daughter...we were into the slogan:

"We are two and we have two"

unlike the Chinese.

There was no Google then and the Manorama Yearbook was silent on the topic. Perhaps this question was not important in the Civil Services Exams...though they had to mug up the meaning of our National Anthem, National Tricolor, and National Emblem...the 3 Lions. 

I Googled for it just now but was no wiser. All I could get was that one Deep Tyagi was its inventor:

"He was 41 years old at the time of his death, but had already made a major contribution to his country’s family planning effort. It was he who was largely responsible for the design and dissemination of a massive communication program that brought awareness and knowledge of family planning to hundreds of millions of Indians. He began his work at a time (1966) when modern contraceptive methods were virtually unknown in rural India. His success in saturating the country with simple, attractive messages and designs (including the Red Triangle, which is now in use in several other countries) overcame age-old communication barriers and greatly increased public awareness of birth control."

...wiki 

...Hmm! I guess I have a dirty mind...

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