Sunday, January 12, 2014

Eggs & Eggheads

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Four years ago my IAS B-i-L called me an egghead. In print.

I didn't know the precise meaning and nuance of egghead and so scrambled to my online Webster. Here is the result: 


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Egghead

: a highly educated person who may not know much about real life

e.g. He dismissed all scientists as a bunch of eggheads.



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Needless to say, I wasn't altogether amused. I am no egghead compared to my boss SDM who ended up with little PF and no pension.

Then on I lost no chance to call all bureaucrats names like chicken and chicken feed in my blogs.

I read today that our fond KGPian had egg all over his face (metaphorically) in his Delhi Durbar. And that his colleague had it literally. 

Sometime back a political egghead called his opponents headless chickens and he had to be unscrambled. Since I am a born vegetarian, I didn't have the privilege of watching a headless chicken in all her glory. So I Googled for it just now and here is a heartless video:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATz3AdbjyRI


I think eggs have more metaphors going with them than any other word.

Humpty Dumpty is always an egg...with hands and legs.

Maugham described a man with a head as bald as an egg. That must be a pretty bald simile...as bald as my car's tires.

There are good eggs and rotten eggs in all baskets. I am told there are a variety of tests to tell them apart without breaking them to make an omelet. Prof MSS told me one in which the housewife spins them and watches. Apparently moment of inertia plays a role in the result...as usual with MSS's eggy logic.

Talking of omelets, after trying a dozen preparations with eggs from the hard-boiled to the deviled, I ended up with omelet as my favorite. 

There was our RuMo who ruled IIT KGP from Calcutta with a steel hand. His breakfast invariably had a 24-egg omelet. And he caught a poor teacher of IIT calling himself 'no chicken either'. And RuMo threw what he thought was a rotten egg out of our golden basket. But Nemesis caught up with him and a decade later he himself laid a big egg trying to eat up an entire steel empire. Eating 24 eggs at one go is one thing and eating up tonnes of steel is quite another.

There is this unending debate which came first: egg or chicken. Let them settle it between them.

Prof JGK of the math dept at Vizagh told to me when I was in my second year physics that Einstein was no genius compared to Riemann without whose curved geometry Einstein would have nowhere to lay his egg. JGK was into theosophy too. Vizagh then had a Theosophical Lodge of which he was a regular visitor. And when news came that physicists discovered that our Universe was infinite but bounded comparing it with a vast egg, he said:

"Our Hindus found it long long ago and called it Brahmanda (Big Egg)"

This combo of virulent Hinduism and Riemannian Geometry is a 20-minute egg.

I discovered just now that there is a blog: 'an egg a day':


  http://aneggaday.blogspot.in/2010_08_01_archive.html 


by a lady living in Boston:


 
 



Great Egg such a blog!


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