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http://www.aslo.org/photopost/data/502/7Balancing_Reservoir.JPG
Talking of balancing reservoirs I am reminded of Father's Hydrostatic Paradox and Oliver Wendell Holmes's twist to it:
----If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply? Not I. Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy?
Don't know what that means? --- Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, --- and the fools know it.....
...Posted by Ishani
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Whenever I read the word, 'balance', I am transported back to my school days at the seaside village, Muthukur, 60 years ago.
There was a student, Narahari Nageswara Rao, a couple of years senior to me. He was such a favorite of my HM Father that he appointed NNR as my unpaid mentor. He was not exactly a bookworm though he knew even then in that remote village that Einstein showed that 'space is curved'...a statement of his that bowled me so completely that I took to Relativity in my later life as a frog takes to its bog.
NNR was living in a hamlet by the side of Muthukur a couple of kilometers away and that much nearer to the Bay of Bengal. Near his home there was a British-type structure known as, Konamal Bungalow...a little dilapidated but still guarded by a caretaker. This bungalow lying in the woods alone in all its splendor was our picnic spot and NNR's favorite haunt before he set off on his beach-combing expeditions all by himself.
One bright Sunday morning, NNR appeared at our doorstep and handed my father an ancient-looking yellowish coin with strange inscriptions on it. He said he found it by the sea in a receding tide. The letters on the coin couldn't be deciphered as the coin was smooth and defaced. And NNR asked Father, his Science-cum-English teacher, if the coin was of gold or a base metal...we didn't have access to an archaeologist nor a goldsmith at Muthukur.
Father at once donned his shirt and asked NNR to follow him to our school. And I tagged along out of curiosity...I was in my Class VII then and didn't know anything about weighing other than by the crude stone-cum-wood balance of our vegetable vendors.
Father then ceremoniously opened his strong room and opened an almirah in which I saw for the first time what Father called a Chemical Balance. It was a grand affair and Father handled it as delicately as if it were his newborn infant. And NNR and he discussed a lot about Archimedes Principle and stuff which I didn't follow at all. And after an hour of fiddling with beakers and water and weights, Father looked up his fond Clarke's Tables of his Madras Christian College vintage and declared to NNR:
"It is a copper coin...not gold"
NNR was overwhelmed and gave his find as a gift to our Muthukur school. Father locked it up securely along with his chemical balance. I don't know what NNR and his poor HM would have done if the coin were pure gold ;)
Anyway it took me 4 more years to understand what Father was doing that Sunday morning with his beaker of water and the weights he picked up gingerly with a forceps...Father was for the moment re-solving the puzzle that his King gave Archimedes, and what he found in his bathtub:
Then on I was dreaming that one day I would do what Father did in his strong room. And it took but 3 years for my dreams to be shattered, like my mom used to do with her recalcitrant almond shells. For, I was enrolled in the prestigious BSc (Hons) in the Andhra University at Vizagh and, lo and behold, the very first lecture for us was taken by a dour teacher who apparently hated his lectures as much as we did. He started attacking the blackboard deriving ugly 'formulas' for the Sensitivity and Stability of a Beam Balance before we had a chance to see and understand what its agate knife edges and stirrups were.
My alma mater shattered so many of my dreams that it is a wonder that I survived 7 wretched years of my stay there. But it took but just one day at IIT KGP for me to recover like a withering lily in the first monsoon shower:
...The other day I was reading about a 'balancing reservoir'.
And I was once again transshipped to a village called Buchreddy Palem when I was a kid of 4. Father was taking his evening walk and asked me if I wanted to see a huge body of water.
All that I recall of that trip was a dark and lovely wood through which we passed. At the end of which I saw the Kaligiri Reservoir...a frightening experience for me.
60 years later I wanted to show its wood and water to my wife and son. We hired our Reddy's Ambassador car for a day and visited it. And the huge water body didn't look half as huge as it did to me because by then I had lived by the seashore for 7 years at Vizagh.
But the wood through which we passed remains as dreamy as Frost's. Development didn't overtake it as it did our Konamal Bungalow which was demolished to make space for one of the biggest new seaports on the Bay of Bengal at Krishnapatnam, my ancestral village.
http://www.aslo.org/photopost/data/502/7Balancing_Reservoir.JPG
Talking of balancing reservoirs I am reminded of Father's Hydrostatic Paradox and Oliver Wendell Holmes's twist to it:
----If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply? Not I. Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy?
Don't know what that means? --- Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, --- and the fools know it.....
...Posted by Ishani
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