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Obiter Dicta:
In re: Yesterday's Paragraph:
"I also used to collect a couple of blue-white stone chips lying between sleepers and carry them to Muthukur in my pocket. When struck against each other in the night they emitted sparks. Perhaps this was the way stone-age man used to light his fires to cook his meat."
...There was this delightful cartoon strip "Flintstones"...the saga of lovable stone age characters in "The Telegraph" newspaper which was launched as a competitor to the good old "The Statesman" in the 1980s Calcutta. That daily soon became a roaring success due to the magic of its famous editor who turned a BJP politician and was for a couple of years a Central Minister too.
But then the skeletons in his cupboard of twenty years ago jumped back to life upon him (like in the Ibsen's "Ghosts" line: "Sins of the fathers visit on their sons"). And then he lost his ministry, and now his defamation case too...he should have lain low like his manifold Bollywood counterparts till the sexual storm in the country blew over.
Talking of sexual harassment I recall this story:
A boss was asked if he lusts his secretary. And he honestly replied:
"Yes of course...if she is beautiful"
"What if she were not beautiful?"
"Same story...why not?" :)
Oliver Wendell Holmes says something like:
"Nature expects every woman to have a right to demand every man to love her; and if not, explain why not"
I read the other day this hilarious news item of a tiger straying repeatedly from its Maharashtra Sanctuary into its Telangana Counterpart shamelessly.
Reason: "He fell in love with a beautiful Telangana tigress"
But that is how Lord God made us:
प्रकृतिं पुरुषं चैव विद्ध्यनादी उभावपि |
विकारांश्च गुणांश्चैव विद्धि प्रकृतिसम्भवान् ||
:)
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I guess most every classmate of mine in our Muthukur school had this secret ambition to become a loco diver...I certainly did.
I once wondered aloud to my father:
"The engine driver must be a superman to expertly drive it upon the rails without fail, in turnings, and in reverse!"
Father laughed and said:
"He doesn't have to. Even if he keeps his hands in his pockets, the train will go on not leaving its rails"
This certainly was a mystery.
I noticed that the wheel was not like the rim of my tricycle...it was not gripping the rail on both its sides. The wheel design was strange. It was asymmetric. It had a flange. Much later I learned why from Prof MSS who said:
"The car has a differential gear to see that the outer wheel turns faster than the inner wheel during turns. The loco doesn't have a differential"
Great!
Wheel is supposed to be man's greatest invention; apart from fire which was God's Gift.
But there was this Punch Cartoon of the 1960s (Ayyoe! Punch got shut down after a glorious 150 years, in 1992):
There was this millipede walking gorgeously on the grounds of a lovely garden. And this kid approaches it quietly from behind and kicks it with his foot. And the millipede gets up, turns into a circle and rolls away on the ground. And the kid exclaims:
"WHEEL!"
"There is nothing new under the Sun":
There is this verse from the Holy Bible:
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again
there is nothing new under the sun
And this from the Rigveda: "dhaataa yathaa poorvamakalpayat"
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Our bus fares were twice our train fares. I wondered why. Father explained:
"Friction on the road is twice the friction on the rails"
Ha! Friction! How intricate that topic is! Rolling friction and sliding friction. And the necessity of friction to make the engine move forward! I saw quite often loco wheels slipping and turning but staying put not making the loco move forward.
All in all our MSM steam engine was a marvel of art and craft. All of us attempted to make sketches of it in our drawing book. It had a lovely spout at its top...it was like a chimney. The amount of jet black smoke it used to emit once in a while was enough to deposit a millimeter thick soot on the faces of folks sitting by the window of the first compartment.
Recall Sean Connery in the movie "Great Train Robbery"
And its sweet whistle: koo (unlike the braying of the later "Canadian Engine" with its bald head).
The open steam cylinder with its crank shaft turning the piston's push-pull into rotary motion...chug chug chug...
Mathematicians, apparently, proved that translational motion can't be converted into rotational motion. Give the credit to our mathematicians...they can prove theorems on any topic on which they have the least idea. I think it was the engineer George Stephenson who proved them wrong and gave us the steam loco design.
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One of the favorite questions raised amongst us was:
"When the train is running fast and you, in your widow seat, drop a coin gently on the ground;.... will the coin fall where you dropped it or will it travel with you?"
Ha! Inertia! How tough a topic it is!
Most certainly the First Law of Newton is the toughest of the three to comprehend. Inertial Forces...Centrifugal, Coriolis...Newton's Ice Pail experiment, Foucault's Pendulum, Inertial Frames, Einstein's General Relativity...the works...
And how dangerous it is to throw an empty coconut shell on a station platform from a train running at full speed...it can be deadly to the passenger on the platform in its rolling tumbling speeding way...
Lots of physics there...
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Our Nellore platform scene was not like this Paddington's (Howrah Station's in the 1960s was somewhat like it):
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