Operation Barbarossa - 3

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After fixing the mirror on its stand, father would take up a small iron bowl and ask one of us to fetch water. And he would dip three of his fingers into the water in the bowl and apply it to his chin. 

That of course would wet the skin and heal its dryness... but didn't help his razor blade...no way.

Trouble is that water has the largest surface tension, next only to mercury. And that would let the hair cling to the wet skin and make it that much harder for the blade to clip. What was required was to make each and every strand of hair stand up erect and be like crop for the sickle. 

That reminds me of this famous Shakespeare quote:

“I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine."

...Ghost in "Hamlet" 

(porpentine = porcupine)

....Bertie Wooster said that "Hamlet is full of quotations":

"Most Britons falsely claim to have read Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' ": Report

I too tried 'Peace and War',
Found it an unreadable bore;
But I read all of Shakespeare
Songs & Sonnets & King Liar.

But, most I love my Bertie,
Shaken to his foundations;
He said with honesty,
"Hamlet's full of Quotations"

...Posted by Ishani

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/490857344501208483/5534916163491096218

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Returning to my father's shaving story:

...so, what was required was a surfactant like soap that reduces the surface tension of water.

But of course there were no soaps in our villages in the 1940s for love or money.

And better than ordinary soaps are "shaving soaps" that give more lather for the buck.

When I grew up and started earning, I was once feeling my oats and bought a 'Godrej Shaving Round' for myself (I couldn't afford its costlier cousin: 'Shaving Cream' that came in tubes...my Didi once mistook her hubby's new shaving cream for tooth paste...with hilarious consequences).

This soap which I bought was enclosed in its round receptacle and needed a 'shaving brush' to tease it out. And bristles of my brush worked on the same principle as our hairs...when wet they clung to one another thick as thieves...once again the surface tension of water...

And if the water were hard, that would be a punishment for all.

By the way, we had a whole chapter on "Hard Water" in our first year university 'Inorganic Chemistry Text Book' written by one PC Ray (a name as unfamiliar to us then as was MN Saha's...Bengalis were then a century ahead of us. Prafulla Chandra Ray was the founder of Bengal Chemicals...Bengal's 'Sulekha Ink' was cheaper and better than the Western 'Parker Ink' later sold as 'Quink Ink'...Tagore gave that name 'Sulekha' to our Swadeshi ink that Gandhiji wanted in order to banish Western goods).

...And we had to learn how to convert hard water into soft.

And the last sentence of that Chapter was:

"Hard water is not injurious for health" (contested now)

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The next implement to emerge from father's LG Hing Box was a blade-sharpener...a glorious affair.

It was a heavy bluish glass block. Its bottom was a rectangle to make it sit squarely on the stool. But its top was semi-cylindrical partly.

Father would take a used blade gingerly into his hands, wet it slightly, place it on the cylindrical hollow, and slide it sidewise up and down like a pendulum; top and bottom.

I guess it was a special kind of glass harder than steel...but what about the leather strop? I have no clue...maybe the 'stick-slip' mechanism of friction  that I heard of much later was working.

My friend Prof NP Rao once taught me an unforgettable lesson on railway pantographs:

Apparently the sliding pantograph of our Railways has to be made of a material softer than that of the high-voltage cable it constantly rubs on...so that when it becomes useless, the pantograph can be taken down easily and serviced...rather than the overhead cable :)

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To be continued...

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