My Comeuppance

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My Comeuppance

1990: IIT KGP:

Experts fascinate. Sometimes terrify.

In the 1950s in our village Muthukur there was this itinerant tribe: Dommaris.

They train their girl-kids into performing frightening tight-rope-tricks.

Blindfolded, they throw their new-born infants high up the air and catch them on their return, without fail.

Yet, most so-called expertise is practice and trickery rather than talent.

In our Second Year Lab in the 1970s, young gullible students, after failing to get their Newton's rings or Biprism fringes or Anderson Bridge balance points for two hours and a half used to look upon me as a wizard since I could get them all in less than a minute.

The poor guys didn't know that I was posted there as a fixture for donkey's years.

I was also brimming with pride that I could get the white light fringes of the Michelson interferometer within a minute in our Fourth Year Lab.

My comeuppance came duly after I "served" IIT KGP for 25 years and got a brand-new Titan wrist watch as a sweet memento from our Deputy Director in the Netaji Auditorium along with a hundred others.

It was like this:

I never bought a wrist watch for myself.

My first watch was a second-hand tiny Favre-Leuba affair my father gifted me when I got my job in IIT KGP in 1965.

It was a manually keyed affair. It had a knurled knob on its side turning which once a day "keyed" up its main spring.

By pulling the knob out and turning, its hands moved so the time can be adjusted.

That watch served me for all of 25 years and beyond.

I was told that my new Titan didn't have a spring to be wound up every day. It had a tiny battery and a chip.

But it still had its knurled knob. Pulling it out I could adjust the time; its hands moved very like my old Favre Leuba's.

Fine.

But it had windows on which were displayed date and day (the latter both in English and French).

These did not come pre-adjusted. They were displaying wrong date and day.

I didn't know how to set them correctly.

And I went on turning the pulled knob for all of 3 hours without success.

It turned out to be improbable, if not impossible, to set the day, date, and time by just turning its hands.

Crestfallen, I admitted failure and took the damn thing to the watch-repair shop in the Tech Market.

The expert whom I knew well was away and the fort was held by his urchin son, who grabbed my Titan, took it in his first, set the day, date, and time in half a minute, and handed it back to me.

I begged him to teach me his trick.

He kindly showed that there was a "step" midway while pulling the knob out. Holding the knob there and turning it this way and that, one can turn the displays in the windows of date and time:

Phew!

I recalled the story where this villager carried his son, bitten by a scorpion, to the village-pundit who confessed that he didn't know the scorpion-mantra.

"Such a BIG pundit you are! You know the vedas, vedangas, rudram, namakam and chamakam. But don't know as small a thing as the "scorpion-mantra"?

Chee chee chee!!!"

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