Rain (Men Only)

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"చిటపట చినుకులు పడుతూ ఉంటే..."

That was the lead line of a song in a Telugu movie of the 1960s. 

It was sung by a dame in a figure-hugging sari drenching herself in driving rain and dancing.

All of us boys, bachelors, married men, and toothless oldies rushed to watch that movie just to ogle at her boobs..

Then there was this Bollywood movie of Raj Kapur in which Padmini swims half-naked in the sacred river Gangaji,..same story...all of us flocked to the idiotic movie just to watch her ample buttocks.

Padma Bhushan Ramachandra Guha once termed that 1950-60 generation "innocent'. 

Now, of course, we got so used to watching stark female nudes on our smart phone ads that old widowers like me flip the pages scared.

All great painters (except our Raja Ravi Varma) painted nude females as the first lesson in their schooling. It is as important as the free-hand drawing of a perfect circle insisted upon by our high school drawing master...I failed miserably. 

Poor Padma Vibhushan MF Hussain got into such hot waters painting our Hindu Goddesses stark naked that he had to flee and die forlorn in an alien land...he should have confined himself to painting his favorite horses (in stark nude).

By the way, what is wrong with artistic nudity? All of us, men and women, were born nude and till recently were cremated nude.

Rebels against this hypocrisy in civilized foreign lands invented Nudist Camps...Punch had this famous cartoon with the punchline:

"Don't look now...but I think I am falling in love with that dame"

Picasso, I am told, once painted a female nude. And a prudish lady seeing it called it vulgar. 

Picasso said:

"No, lady! It is not vulgar; however, I can make it vulgar, watch!"

...and added fancy chappals on his nude's comely legs. 

I would have made it more vulgar painting a bindi on her fair forehead...

Talking of our South Indian bindis I often recall this diverting episode:

My son and I were visiting my youngest cousin in his home at Nellore a decade ago.

As we were chatting, my cousin's daughter came out and joined us. She had graduated from her B Tech Course and had joined a software firm three months earlier in Chennai where she was living in a working women's hostel.

My cousin noticed her bare face and whispered:

"Go in, wear a bindi, and come!" ("వెళ్ళి బొట్టు పెట్టుకొని రా!")

She ignored her father thrice (like Julius Caesar ignored Mark Antony thrice when Antony offered him that crown); and got vexed, and went in, and returned with such a tiny excuse of a bindi that it needed a traveling microscope of our first year lab to view it.

Her father was however assuaged.

Fathers never grow up...ask Ishani :)

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Sorry for that long digression...I wanted to talk about rains.

Whenever it rains here I am reminded of RK Narayan's piece on the "Umbrella Devotee" who had 5 umbrellas in his home securely hidden.

While living at Kharagpur, I too had 5...one for myself in my home, one in my office, two for the truant maid, and one for my wife...son never used an umbrella...he considered it infra dig.

It rains heavily in Kharagpur...the town is right on the monsoon trough (and so we had a Meteorology Tower equipped with SODAR). 

It rains copiously for the four monsoon months, and in spring, summer, autumn and winter...in 1978 it rained all of 3500 mm...the annual average is 1400 mm.

And umbrella repairers there have a field day....they roamed the streets, occupied arcades in the Tech Market, and were always in demand.

And then I retired and tried settling down in Hyderabad carrying all my 5 umbrellas from Kharagpur. But it rains only during the monsoons here. And the annual average is just a pleasant 700 mm.

So there are no umbrella devotees here nor umbrella repairers. 

So sad!

By the way, umbrella is a marvel of design that survived centuries. Its ribs are better than God made.

My father had a black umbrella on which he got a white cover stitched...

...rather like the White Knight of Alice who sang:

"...But I was thinking of a plan

To dye one's whiskers green,

And always use so large a fan

That it could not be seen..."

I asked him why, and father mumbled something about blackbody radiation that I couldn't follow then...

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Whenever I see a glorious rainbow splashed on the lovely monsoon horizon, instead of getting a thrill in my poetic heart, I get embarrassed. 

Reason is that I took all of thirty years to understand why that arc of a circle always comes from a cone of semi-vertical angle of about 41 degrees...

...when I luckily got a hint in an obscure Russian Book sold for Rs 10 on the pavement in the forecourt of the Kharagpur Durga Puja Pandal in 1985.

It has to do with what every physics student knows as the 'minimum deviation' in a prism (without understanding it).

But a rain drop is not a prism with just two refractions...in the rainbow formation, it has a total internal reflection as well.

The calculation involved some geometry, trigonometry, and calculus which I was fearfully postponing to do for another thirty years.

Last year I happened to mention it to my young friend Professor JK Sharma while gossiping about kings and cabbages on our lawn bench here. 

And he went home, did it in half an hour, and showed me his calculations and result in his beautiful handwriting.

And then I was indeed thrilled.

https://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2021/02/guest-column-professor-jk-sharma-from.html

Actually the reason why a minimum deviation is required in rainbow formation is not understood by drawing just a single ray...it needs a bundle of rays :)

And then I also understood the "Schuster Method" of focusing a spectrometer in the dark room that we used blindly 60 years back...

Better late than never :)

Thank you Sharmajee!

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