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I read that the British, during their Imperial Days in India, loved to get gifts and presents from their servile Indian princes. The list was bizarre...it included peacocks, elephants, monkeys, ivory, silk and pearls.
The first time I met an elephant was in my Class IV text book. It had this crazy story, with pictures, of the tailor and the elephant. The mahout of this elephant was daily riding her along the streets of the town to the river to give her her daily bath, much needed. And on her way, this tailor sitting on the floor of his shop started befriending this elephant. You know, elephants have this trait of restlessness...they keep swinging their trunks this way and that like compound pendulums of our first year physics lab.
And one day, when this elephant's trunk reached this tailor squatting in his shop, he gave her a guava fruit. And she swallowed it and liked it. And repeated her trunk-poking the next day and the tailor gave her another guava fruit. This continued for a month.
But one day, the tailor didn't have a guava fruit with him and so when the elephant poked her trunk in, he pushed his knitting needle into her trunk. The elephant obviously didn't like the nasty gesture but kept quiet. And carried on to the river where she filled up her trunk with dirty water, like our Dr Ishwar Reddy at Muthukur used to do with his syringe. And on her way back, the elephant spat and spewed all those gallons of sewage water on the tailor and his clothes and his sewing machine...just to teach him a lasting lesson.
The moral of the story was supposed to be that elephants have a terrific memory...'elephantine' is the word for it.
When this story was read out in the class by our teacher, she was laughing and her students grinned...except me.
My sympathy was firmly with the poor tailor. This elephant certainly was ungrateful. She forgot all those dozens of guava fruit she got free from him. And just because one day he happened to be irritable, maybe because his wife gave him stale coconut chutney or his kid failed in his JEE or his landlord asked him to vacate, the elephant, instead of forgiving, punished him out of pique. This shows that elephants have very poor long-term memory.
Like the public.
Who amongst us never committed a mistake?
This takes me to my Pre-University Chemistry text book...it was thin alright. And there was this sentence which regaled my teacher:
"Berzelius rashly concluded that equal volumes of all gases at equal temperature and pressure have equal number of atoms"
Apparently it was wrong and it was left to Avagadro to correct Berzelius by replacing 'atoms' with 'molecules'.
But the damage was done. All of us thought that Berzelius was a fool, a nincompoop, an upstart and an ignoramus.
But Wiki tells me that he was a famous Swedish Chemist who made lasting contributions to chemistry (which were not at all rash) and he is known as the Father of Swedish Chemistry and his birthday on August 20 is celebrated there as the Berzelius Day.
Even Einstein admitted that he made a grievous mistake in proposing the so-called Cosmological Constant...folks later thought that his admission of his mistake was a greater mistake.
But I digress.
When I was living in the Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP in the 1960s, Dr H living in Qrs C- 41 made friends with me...he was a lover of PGW and used to borrow my rich Wodehouse Collection (not necessarily returning them).
One day he took me to his bachelor den to show off his latest acquisition...his 'HMV Star' record player. And there I met his neighbor, Dr P.
Dr P was an unusually quiet gent, very unlike his upcountry cousins who were then a fairly noisy lot. And he was dressed in a torn banian and fading pajamas. And within minutes, his kids started visiting him...I counted at least half a dozen, of all sizes and shapes and sexes...all in their preteens. And wondered that any poor teacher in those enlightened times should have so many kids, like my father did a generation ago when infant mortality was rampant and parents thought 'the more the merrier' as the best bet...and lost...all of us survived to their eternal chagrin.
I thought he must be poor, uncouth, and uncultured.
But later inquiries revealed that when he went home to his village on vacation he had to get down with his large family at a wayside station and wait. Till the fleet of elephants sent by his father duly arrived to receive him and his family to take them home. And I was told that his father owned almost his entire village and more and had the proverbial 'peacocks, elephants, monkeys, ivory, silk and pearls' as part of his rich estate.
And Dr P was the gold medalist of his university, and predicted that all his kids would do well in their lives. Which turned out to be true...all of them landed up in the golden sands of California duly. One was our own student of Physics later on.
And, once, Dr P was annoyed with our Bigg Boss for not getting his due recognition, and the Bigg Boss, looking at him, made the same mistake that I did and thought here was an uncouth imposter and asked him to get lost. And, within minutes the Bigg Boss got a phone call from the PM's Office in Delhi to make amends to Dr P.
The moral of this story seems to be:
"Count your enemy's elephants before you insult him"
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Chandamama Elephant Story of the 1950s
There was this rich man of Bihar who had dozens and scores and hundreds of elephants in his estate. And he had four sons. And he made this Will before he died:
"Half the number of my elephants would go to my first son. Half of the remaining to my second son. Half of the remaining to my third son. And half of the remaining to my fourth son."
And by when he died he had lost large parts of his estate and he was left with only 15 elephants. And after the 13th day ritual, his Will was read out in public and everyone was at a loss how to divide his 15 surviving elephants taking half of 15 and so on without slicing them into pieces.
And a passerby riding his elephant asked about the turmoil and was told the quandary.
He then asked the four sons to line up their 15 elephants and added his own as the 16th elephant on the right side of the line so that the total became a nice 16.
The first son was asked to take his half of 16, from the left side...which is 8, and walk away.
The second son was then asked to take away his half of the remaining, which is 4, and get lost.
The third son was asked to take away his half of the remaining, which is 2, and go home.
The fourth son was asked to take away half of the remaining, which is 1, and go forth.
And the last one that was left turned out to be the elephant of the guest himself...he took it back and rode away on his errand.
It just happens that I don't know the moral of this story...
Moral: Round-off to the next power of 2
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