Misentropology

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"MRS. PEARCE: No, sir. We shall have to be very particular with this girl as to personal cleanliness.

HIGGINS: Certainly. Quite right. Most important.

MRS. PEARCE: I mean not to be slovenly about her dress or untidy in leaving things about.

HIGGINS [going to her solemnly]: Just so. I intended to call your attention to that [He passes on to Pickering, who is enjoying the conversation immensely]. It is these little things that matter, Pickering. Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves is as true of personal habits as of money. [He comes to anchor on the hearthrug, with the air of a man in an unassailable position].

MRS. PEARCE: Yes, sir. Then might I ask you not to come down to breakfast in your dressing-gown, or at any rate not to use it as a napkin to the extent you do, sir. And if you would be so good as not to eat everything off the same plate, and to remember not to put the porridge saucepan out of your hand on the clean tablecloth, it would be a better example to the girl. You know you nearly choked yourself with a fishbone in the jam only last week.

HIGGINS [routed from the hearthrug and drifting back to the piano]: I may do these things sometimes in absence of mind; but surely I don't do them habitually. [Angrily] By the way: my dressing-gown smells most damnably of benzine.

MRS. PEARCE. No doubt it does, Mr. Higgins. But if you will wipe your fingers--..."

.........Shaw's Pygmalion

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By the time men and women reach their marriageable age, whatever it is, they tend to fall into two orthogonal classes:

1. Order-Lovers
2. Comfort-Lovers

If luckily, but rarely, the couple belong to the same class, they don't divorce on grounds of order/disorder incompatibility (they may though on other grounds like meat and fish).

Listen to Higgins again on marriage:

"I suppose the woman wants to lead her own life, and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south, and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind. So, here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so."

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As they age, folks tend to sink into:

1. Order-Freaks
2. Comfort-Freaks

When we moved to an Apartment Block at IIT from our good old 'independent' Qrs, we were sort of compelled to socialize, or at least make a pretense of it. So, we returned visit to Prof R's apartment and as soon as I entered their drawing room, I stepped back and said "sorry" and left my comfort-footwear outside...the place was forbiddingly clean and frighteningly posh. The sofa set was like a Maharaja's, the lighting was concealed and dim and colorful, the center-piece was all Belgian glass works, there was a mini-chandelier looking down on us snobbishly, the pelmets were of Burma teak, the showcase was threateningly antique, all the walls had mantelpiece-like fittings holding bone china figurines and the whole place was carpeted wall-to-wall. Our hostess was clearly worried; and we quit within five minutes, breaking one or two glassware while negotiating our way in and out of the narrow leg-spaces.

We never visited them again...Mrs R was happy for that and found it easier to come and chat with my wife whenever she was in the mood.

On the other hand, when we visited Prof M's place, everything was 'homely' and they said, "No need to leave your footwear outside"...they were in their shoes and chappals; with legs up on this cot or that chair, floor littered with cigarette butts, tea-cups with their spent tea everywhere, a couple of broken chairs here and there like in the 'Office' I shared with DB for twenty years. Frankly we felt the kitchen smells drifting and wafting all over the house a little overawing...we were vegetarians and the rich aroma of fish fried in mustard oil was as alien to our noses as much as our idly-dosa-sambar-chutney to theirs.

Mrs M also felt it convenient to chat whenever she was in the mood in our humble face-and-featureless apartment.

And Mrs M would start appreciatively of the clean and neat and beautifully kept drawing room of Mrs R and slowly theorize that there is no point spending the whole day of the whole year of the whole life dusting, wiping, sprinkling, watering, vacuuming just to show off for a visitor or two that one may have in a year in a deserted campus like ours...and end it with the lemma: "Just walk into her kitchen...it is frightfully dirty as if it is the backyard of a budget hotel."

And Mrs R when she visits my wife would start appreciatively of the 'homely' atmosphere of Mrs M's place; but would turn her nose up and clean it with her pocket hankie as if words fail her and she had to resort to gestures to express herself.

But, make no mistake; both the Profs produced many Ph D's and Papers and were renowned for their hard work; and their kids came first in their schools.

This should be a lesson to us not to judge people with the cleanliness or otherwise of the places they live in.

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Dr JRK, after spending a year at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford told me that when he visited the famous EPR Lab of Bleany, he was shocked to find it dirty, disheveled and highly entropied and thought that it was abandoned; till he saw a Research Scholar enter, insert a sample, bend down and crawl on the floor, and found the switch; and in a minute he saw on the oscilloscope such a huge big and noise-free signal that he never saw before or after.

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Listen to Feynman:

"Now I had read a lot of papers on cyclotron experiments, and there weren't many from MIT. Maybe they were just starting. But there were lots of results from places like Cornell, and Berkeley, and above all from Princeton. Therefore what I really wanted to see, what I was looking forward to, was the PRINCETON CYCLOTRON. That must be something!

So first thing on Monday, I go into the physics building and ask, "Where is the cyclotron...which building?"

"It's downstairs, in the basement...at the end of the hall."

In the basement? It was an old building. There was no room in the basement for a cyclotron. I walked down to the end of the hall, went through the door, and in ten seconds I learned why Princeton was right for me...the best place for me to go to school. In this room there were wires strung all over the place! Switches were hanging from the wires, cooling water was dripping from the valves, the room was full of stuff, all out in the open. Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you ever saw. The whole cyclotron was in one room, and it was complete, absolute chaos!

It reminded me of my lab at home. Nothing at MIT had ever reminded me of my lab at home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results. They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew where everything was, they knew how everything worked, there was no engineer involved, except maybe he was working there too. It was much smaller than the cyclotron at MIT, and "gold-plated"?...it was the exact opposite. When they wanted to fix a vacuum, they would drip glyptal on it, so they were dropping glyptal on the floor. It was wonderful! Because they worked with it. They didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons! (Incidentally they had a fire in that room, because of all the chaotic mess they had...too many wires...and it destroyed the cyclotron. But I'd better not tell about that!)

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Now listen to Nino:

"...Our house has a sort of superstructure which forms its third floor, where years ago I set up a little private three-room apartment of my own, complete with bedroom, bath and study. I had the notion that if I could go up there and get away from it all I'd be able to concentrate on my work. But almost from the start, I found that ideas are refractory to stair-climbing. They stick close to the ground, and the highest they ever got is the second floor. And sometimes, in order to get them this high, I had to go all the way down.

It's a great nuisance, but there you are. We middle-class men pick up our ideas in the kitchen and pantry, in the rooms where our family is living. We haven't the imagination to make something out of nothing. Our ideas must be rooted in reality, and we're lost unless we're in direct contact with the little world in which we live, the world of our home..."

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And listen to Khushwant Singh on RKN:

"... Being with Narayan on his afternoon strolls was an experience. He did not go to a park but preferred walking up the bazaar. He walked very slowly and after every few steps he would halt abruptly to complete what he was saying. He would stop briefly at shops to exchange namaskaras with the owners, introduce me and exchange gossip with them in Kannada or Tamil, neither of which I understood. I could sense these gentle strolls in crowded bazaars gave him material for his novels and stories. I found him very likeable and extremely modest despite his achievements..."

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So, Domestic Entropy doesn't matter much...except that it can be irritating...till we get used to it.

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