Misentropology

========================================================================

"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

************************************************************************************************************

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."

******************************************************************************************

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.

************************************************************************************************

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.

********************************************************************************************

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!)

********************************************************************************************

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..."

******************************************************************************************

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..."

***********************************************************************************************************

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

==========================================================================

petnames.com

********************************************************************************************************************

http://deliverygirl30.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/honey.jpg

"...There are 20 mahouts and five umbrella bearers in TTD (Tirupati-Tirumala Devasthanam) who take care of six elephants, two horses and two bulls used during special rituals and Brahmotsavams. The TTD's six elephants are named Avanija, Mahalaxmi, Vaishnavi, Padma, Padmavathi and Laxmi..."



....DC, Monday 5, March 2012



The news report doesn't mention the names of the two horses and two bulls but I am sure they do have pet-names (not to talk of the 20 mahouts and five umbrella bearers). Every owner gives his dog a pet name for sure. The first I heard was when a new Doctor was appointed to our Village Hospital and he had an Alsatian which his school-going son used to flaunt to dumb onlookers like me, throwing a bald tennis ball far away and shouting: "Tiger, Fetch it!". In one out of two attempts, Tiger did fetch it, running and catching the ball in his mouth before it landed. In the other attempt, Tiger was distracted by the enticing stray bitches...there was no Alsatian she-dog in our Village and the good Doctor was against cross-breeding.

Thurber wrote a whole piece titled: "How To Name A Dog" but towards the end he apologizes:

"This article has degenerated into a piece that should properly be entitled 'How Not To Name A Dog'. I was afraid it would. It seems only fair to make up for this by confessing to a few of the names I have given to my dogs, with the considerable help, if not, indeed, the insistence, of their mistress. Most of my dogs have been females, and they have answered, with apparent gladness, to such names as Jeannie, Tessa, Julie and Sophie. Sophie is a black French poodle whose kennel name was Christabel, but she never answered to Christabel, which she considers as foolish a name for a dog as Pamela, Jennifer, Clarissa, Jacqueline, Guinevere, and Shelmerdine. Sophie is opposed, and I am also, to Ida, Cora, Blanche and Myrtle..."

Lewis Carroll gave Alice's pet cat the name: Dinah; and there is a raging debate in the goofyspace as to whether it is a male or female; a question, as they say, that properly must concern only Dinah when it comes of age:


http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/07/importance-of-fairy-tales.html


A cow or two is ok...you can name them Laxmi and Svetha. But what would you do with a herd of a dozen buffaloes which is the norm for any buffalo-loving owner down South? Kali, Kalvi, Kaloo, Kalavathi, Kalki, Kalahani, Kalaharini, almost exhausts my inventive powers...to leave out Kalvey as very very offensive.

But the most famous buffalo in our mythology is of course the Vehicle of Lord Yama; and I was curious just now to know if it has a name (I say 'it' because I was not sure of its gender). And here is the answer I got from the Web (I quote it verbatim):


"The vehicle or Vahana that is associated with Yama, the Hindu God of Death, is the black buffalo. The name of the Vehicle of Buffalo is Paundraka. Legend has it that Paundraka was born from the thighs of Rudra form of Shiva. It is as quick as the mind. Paundraka is a He Buffalo. The black color represents the unknown world that a person goes after death. There is a belief that Buffalo is one of the most senseless animals. Just like the buffalo, Death arrives to us senselessly---and takes our life without looking at age, status, religion or any other social parameters":


http://www.hindu-blog.com/2012/01/black-buffalo-vehicle-of-yama.html


Coming to parrots, I thought pirates called their pet parrot: Polly, but Long John Silver is different; he called his parrot: Captain Flint.

In our Village it was a common sight to watch the monkey-owning street mendicants make their bread'n'butter pets perform several unwilling feats. They invariably called their breadwinners: Hanuman. Some lack of variety there, for, we have Vali, Sugreev, Angad et al (et al means I don't know anymore).

There were also an unending stream of snake-charmers but I don't recall them calling their snakes by any name...they only prodded them mercilessly till one of them stood up and blinked and pretended to dance to the pungi (been) of her owner. They could easily have named them Nag (sorry Prof!), Seshu (sorry Friend!) or Vasuki...

Coming to Vasu, a very common South Indian abbreviation for Sreenivas, NP's younger son's last name, his Bengali friends at KGP used to call him, invariably, "Basu".

From now on, I will call Aniket (Basu) as "Vasu"...

My son also was given the unpronounceable name: Sreenivas Shreenath. His Bengali friends (of both sexes) used to call him by his pet name: Sonu; and his American customers and vendors call him: "Sree"...with difficulty.

...Posted by Ishani



****************************************************************************************************************************************************

Dadi Kaku

============================================================================

Bengalis have a penchant for nicknames. For the first twenty formative years of my life I lived in AP but now I don't recall any abiding nickname given to anyone then. But the moment I landed at KGP, there were many that stuck in my memory. If you quit Bengal after living there for decades and didn't acquire an apt nickname (like me), then you are a very ordinary chap with nothing to distinguish you.

Bengalis not only like nicknames but are proud of them. During the very first week of my stay there, I caught (hold of) a severe cold and was advised to visit the campus B C Roy Hospital. The Doctor wrote a prescription and asked me to give it to Dadi Kaku in the Dispensary. I didn't understand the meaning of either Dadi or Kaku. So I thought it was his real 'school' name. And went over to the window titled Dispensary and asked for Dadi Kaku. A hefty, swarthy, bearded chap guffawed and took my prescription and doled out the three sets of tablets and spelt out the instructions: "Eta shokal, boikal or rathri belai ekta kore..." I left the Counter baffled but curious.

He was then about thirty, with a dark trimmed beard and a booming voice and full of good humor and joie de vivre. And he remained so for the next forty years except that his trimmed beard changed colors progressively like the leaves of the banyan tree do from Spring to Winter. I asked many what his real name was but few could tell me...it didn't seem to be frightfully important. But I am stubborn and got to know it from himself later on by when we became friends, although I rarely visited BCR again.

It was like this: A few weeks after my wife married me, she discovered that her hubby was a gem of a chap except that he was as poor as a Texas Millionaire...keeping his head just above the water level repaying two PF loans and one Credit Society loan. And she was born with a stainless steel spoon in her mouth. And she was used to shampooing her hair with Clinic Medicated Shampoo every Friday, burning a big hole in my pocket. I didn't say anything but one day, unbeknown to me, she bought a Shikakai Soap ten times cheaper than that Shampoo. The Campus then had a terrific water scarcity and every lady in the house used to keep all her taps open and listen watchfully to the whistling whoosh of air first, followed by gurgles, followed by the weeping sound of a thin stream of water. And that wintry day it happened around 8 in the night. She rushed into the bathroom and emerged ten minutes later, wiping her wet hair with a towel the way they typically do...twisting, squeezing, winnowing, blowing...

As I was watching the ritual enchanted, her fair face was turning redder and redder till it looked as if it were a burnished copper vessel. And within minutes she was itching and scratching and crying. And, being a medico, she said she was having an attack of virulent allergic dermatitis and needs to be given an injection or two of Avil on an emergency basis. And let out the story of her 'budget cutting'.

And it was 9 in the night. There were no telephones, the campus was deserted, I had only a WWII rusted pushbike and all rickshawallas gone home and the lone medical shop at the Tech Market would shut shop anytime. In such situations, the male mind wants to fly away and escape first and think later. So, I took out my bike and raced towards the Salua Road without a plan in mind. As I was crossing it, I saw a figure cycling and singing in the darkness and I recognized the booming voice of Dadi Kaku going home after his duties at the BCR. And I stopped him and told him my predicament.

He at once turned left and ordered me to rush to the Tech Market while he would rush to my Qrs C-1/97 and start 'boiling' his syringe and look after my wife. Rest is simple...one vial of Avil cured her within minutes and Dadi Kaku stayed back an hour or more to watch if there is any 'reaction' to Avil. And she slept like a child.

I then took his hands in mine and said nothing could compensate the Godly help he rendered but I would be happy to pay his fees...And he blew his top and said in Bengali something to the effect that he would never have charged anyone stuck in such circs and more so for a medico. And asked for a cup of chai which I made and we two shared the hot drink in cold weather.

And then on we became friends and I discovered that he was a Chakrabarty and proud of it. Later on I came to know why, when we started visiting the Campus Durga Puja Pandal. For those five or six days, Dadi Kaku was 'deputed' to the Pandal to act as Purohit and preside over the Puja Rituals with as much devotion and dedication as he dispensed to patients at BCR. And I couldn't recognize him till my wife spotted him and said it was Dadi Kaku over there in his new avatar, clad in dhoti and displaying his hirsute chest and chanting mantras and dancing with the arti in his hand.

It was a treat to watch and recall...

***************************************************************************************************************

Addendum to Funnelmelody

My young friend from Chile, Sourya Ray (M Sc 2001 Class), writes:

"The correct pronunciation is just as it is spelled...Chi--le"

Muchas Gracias, Sourya!

**************************************************************************************************************

Pocketing Compliments

Gandhijee, despite his crazy ideas, wrote highly readable English (and threw them out). When some racist white once insulted him (by default) he says he debated within himself for a second and decided to 'pocket' it.

Pocketing insults is magnanimous...but what about pocketing compliments?

I had to do it about four years ago, when I received this mail from an illustrious KGPian:

"Dear Prof. Sastry,

I enjoyed reading with great interest your column, titled "First Class Encounters" in the latest issue of the KGPian, October 2007. I do not know whether you will remember me or not, but I studied Physics from 1970 till 1972 at IIT, Kharagpur, getting my M.Sc. from there in 1972, before leaving for USA...I eventually completed my Ph. D. from University of California at Berkeley in 1982, spent two years at CERN, returned to Berkeley and stayed from 1984 till 2001, went to Thomas Jefferson National Lab 2001 till 2007 and now in the UK at the Cockcroft Institute.

I often think of my brief two years at IIT KGP with fond memories. You taught us post-graduate Statistical Mechanics in first and second year M.Sc. Program, from the textbook of Landau and Lifshitz. We were introduced to Microcanonical and Grand canonical ensembles etc. and it was a lot of new explorations……Being a young professor allowed to lecture, you were one of the most conscientious ones and I did appreciate your teaching, despite the subject being a difficult one. It ended up being one of my favourite subjects in later years.

I do wish to visit IIT KGP one of these days when I get a chance. In the mean time, I wanted to drop you a line or two expressing my heartfelt appreciation of what you have done to a generation of young minds……"

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

gps: O, well, well, it is all very very nice and kind...but it just happens that I never taught post-graduate Statistical Mechanics in my life...

Still, I pocketed the compliments that should have gone to someone else I don't recall...it would have been unpleasant to do anything else but pocket them...

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2008/01/first-class-encounter.html

=============================================================================

Live Ends

==========================================================================

When we were kids, long long ago, Nellore, our District HQs, was a small and cute town. The arterial road of the town was the Grand Trunk Road connecting Madras and Delhi (It is an impostor...the real GT Road ran from Dhaka to Peshawar). Shops and markets crowded either side of our GT Road eventually. So, a bypass road came up (now there is a bybypass and a bybybypass Road...like 'anastomosis' meaning: the reconnection of two streams that previously branched out, such as blood vessels or leaf veins...wiki).

So, in our childhood the GT Road from Madras to Nellore split a few km before Nellore and the bypass road called the Chinna Bazar Road bifurcated into an arc and rejoined the GT Road at the Pennar river. The zone between the diameter and the arc roads had a plethora of residential buildings, Collectorate, Imperial Bank (now SBI) etc. It was crisscrossed by a couple of dozen capillaries. And we kids used to play hide and seek along these gullies and discovered that, no matter whichever gully you took, you wouldn't reach a dead end. They were all live ends connecting the two main roads...in the rainy season some planks were laid to cross the rivulets.

Same with Gudur, the small town my parents settled in. The two major roads had several gullies connecting them....you take anyone and you will not be lost.

At KGP, we had the State Highway called the Salua Road running North-South and bifurcating the IIT Real Estate. In 1965, there were hardly any residential Qrs on its Eastern half (now it is the Posh Half). The entire Campus (other than the Academic Buildings) like the Qrs, Tech Market, Halls of Residence, Diro's Bungalow all lay on the Western Half. There were two bypass roads, the inner one called the Tech Market Road and the outer the DVC Road (also called Periphery Road).

Late one evening, there was a call for my wife (a practicing Doctor then) from Prof BCB, a family friend of us, that his mother was ill. So, my wife, me and my infant son reached there (she by rickshaw, me by pushbike, my son by the front basket attached to it). And my wife wrote a prescription and asked me to fetch the medicines from the Tech Market while BCB (a bachelor) stayed back looking after his aged mother. BCB was then living in one of the palatial A-Type Qrs in the West Half. And I was fifteen years old at KGP by then. So, I pushed my son into his basket and merrily rode as fast as I could to the Tech Market along one of the bylanes that appeared before me. After ten long minutes I found myself on the DVC Road. And I turned back and retraced my path, trying all the while to enter the Inner Bypass somewhere or the other and after another ten minutes I found myself on the Salua Road. I cursed myself and retraced my path and again found myself on the DVC Road. I wouldn't have given up that easily but for the fact that the Medical Shop at the Tech Market would shut shop by 9 PM. So, with my tail between my legs, I took the Inner Bypass Road from the Salua Road, not making the contour integral, bought the medicines, drove back to the Salua Road and then took the known lane to BCB's Qrs. And everyone was wondering what happened to gps. I blushed and told some cock-and-bull-story.

The next day before the sun set, I did the opposite of 'recce' (let us call it 'wrecke') and found that I ought to have taken a right instead of the obvious straight at the St Agnes School. I was narrating this exploit of mine to Dr CLR and he laughed and said it is the fate of all theoreticians...they do contour integration when a straightforward real axis thing would do. And told me that when he was an RS in BC Roy Hall in the early 60s, he used to take long walks along all the gullies of the Campus, but constantly turning back and looking at the IIT Tower and its 'head-light' as if it were the Lighthouse for lost ships. The Campus was young then and so the Tower was visible from any spot in the Campus...but not by the time of my misadventure...the mango, neem, guava, pipal, banyan, and a dozen other shooting trees planted with love by the pioneers and tended by their successors grew so tall that we couldn't even see our own Qrs from the one right behind it.

So much for live ends.

So, when we rented an apartment down the Banjara Hills in Hyderabad and I started exploring the neighborhood taking long walks by the evening, I was often stymied by ending up against a dead end so dead that there was no left or right turn I could take...I had to turn back and try and retrace.

I could finally guess why. Like Feynman solved this problem of finding one's way back from the outskirts of a town, the thumb rule is that a gully narrows down as you approach a dead-end. Feynman's rule was to look at the overhead power lines...they get smaller in number as you go out of a residential area. But such rules work only in a 'normal' network. In the Banjara Hills 'posh' area I am referring to, there was no dearth of money but an acute dearth of living space (the lebensraum of Hitler). So, to show off their riches, they must have spent a lot of money to keep the road as wide as possible till you reach their palatial building's outer wall and stand and stare and envy and curse them. Dead Ends by intent.

When I was a kid, my Father took me by the GT Express (another impostor) from Nellore to Madras. I never saw any city like that before. So, when the train was approaching the dead end of the famous 7-platforms, I was worried it will hit the cement embankment and crash with a loud sound. But of course the Driver was good and he eased it right to the dead end. And then I was in a quandary...how and where does the Engine reverse itself so it could one day get back to Nellore the right way front and not backing itself all the way. I asked a couple of my city-bred cousins and they were clean bluffing that it takes a triangular arc between Madras Central, Basin Bridge and Beach Stations.

When I grew up to be a student at AU in Waltair, the question appeared more acutely embarrassing since the train was leading to not a dead cemented end but right into the Bay of Bengal. And I was too grown up to ask anyone and get ridiculed. I got sick till one afternoon I was walking in the Yard and found a giant turn-table on which an engine mounted and sat and the circular table turned 180 degrees and released the Engine head to tail. I guess something like this is done to Elephants trapped the wrong way round.

The question became moot when in KGP I first saw the EMU Locals...they had pantographs at both ends and I guess they are like the mythical double-headed snakes that had no front or back and you always wonder, like Alice, "Which is your head and which tail?"

One wit at KGP, Mr Rao, was talking about Mr Murthy and said contemptuously that Murthy was like an EMU Engine...you could never trust him...he can go back or forth depending on the situation...with as much ease as a double-headed snake...

I disagreed heartily...

===========================================================================

Box Normalization

==========================================================================

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum
Drink and the Devil have done for the rest-
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum

.......Treasure Island

***************************************************************************************************

When I was young someone told me that Treasure Island is a children's story. And that it was all about pirates. And Mark Twain wrote: "Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates."

Well, piracy is again rampant; in both the real and virtual spaces.

That 'lead' poem cited above frightened me. I also read Gulliver's Travels to the Lilliput Island, and thought only 15 Lilliputs could stand on the dead man's chest...I also read later that in the Dark Ages, Theology centered around arguments like how many angels can be accommodated on the tip of a pin...'A Hundred' as that ad for Bagpipers went...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVvRT6UBjmc...


It was only much later that I learned the other meaning of 'chest' as a big box. Nice pun that!

Talking of chests, the best, I hope is the Hope Chest...(pun again!)...often it turns out to be hopeless, if her husband turns out to be like the perennially high watchmen of Hyderabad apartments.

The biggest chest I ever saw was owned by my Grannie. It could easily hold half a dozen kids hiding in a sitting position. By our time, it came to be used as a soiled clothes' bin but I am sure it must have seen better times.

The next biggest I saw regularly was whenever I used to visit KGP Railway Station. They were all piled up in the Guards' Room and taken out one by one as each train arrived. Often, in the nights, they were dumped outside on Platform # 2. And I used to sit gingerly on the one in the lampshade hoping that the Guard, whose name was pasted on the locked chest, wouldn't come out and shoo me. I always wondered what such a huge box could contain that is of such vital importance to the running of our Puri Express that was perennially late. But never had the guts to ask the Guard to show me.

As for the smallest box I saw, it was surely the matchbox. During our childhood, all matchboxes used to come in a regulation size and had a Cheetah Fight painted in color on their front face and some ad on the back. It is anybody's guess what a poor cheetah getting 'sickled' by a rummy youth has to do with matches. But all successful 'branding' may be like that...it stirs your imagination and leaves it there hanging. Like for instance what that lovely and enchanting picture on the packet of a Passing Show has to do with cigarettes...or for that matter...Capstan Navy Cut. My Father could answer what a 'capstan' is and 'navy' is but not 'cut'...he was a nonsmoker.

Then there was this Pandora's Box, the enchanting story in our Class X English text book. 'Hope' (again) is the name of the last bug out alright, which cured the kids' cuts inflicted by Trouble by its merest touch. Once long ago I asked Supratim why he reads by crazy blog every morning, as he said he does. Among other things, he said, the blogs are 'hopeful' ;-)

The Box that every QM student encounters, for no obvious reason, is the one that holds the Particle (sometimes with oscillating walls):

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/05/elephant-monkey.html

It is only much later, when you come to Scattering and Quantum Stats that you see the Box at work all the time. It is an artifice which John von Neumann would never agree to. Just put the 'system' in a box of volume V, solve the problem, let V tend to infinity...you go over from the discrete to the continuous...a mean trick in the eyes of pure mathematicians, for, discrete infinity and continuous infinity are as different as hive and honey. But Physics folks are like carpenters...who don't care if 'pi' is 22 / 7 or 3.14 or even 3...it depends on the price you are prepared to pay.

But of course, there is one nice thing about such boxes. If you don't ask the 'right' (experimentally observable) question, the volume of the box, V, doesn't cancel and sticks out like a sore thumb...an acid test if you are making an idiot of yourself.

There was a youth in the Mech Engg Dept at IIT KGP who was a pure math buff. He once visited our Physics Dept and argued with whoever was available that QM is all wrong...since they use the Dirac Delta Function all the time, without knowing that it is absurd to call it a 'function'...he said it was a 'distribution'. Folks like me and even DB couldn't care if it is a function or distribution as long as it works...like that cat's name is irrelevant as long as it catches mice.

But he was unrelenting and insistent and so we pushed him into SDM's room thinking it would be like David vs Goliath. But we could hear laughter from both voices and after half an hour of feast of reason and flow of apparent soul, the young man walked out jubilantly.

The next day I happened to be in SDM's room and SDM said: "That young man was talking sense...he will go a long way".

He did, indeed. He went to Canada and ultimately wrote a book with Truesdell...apparently Truesdell wrote in the Preface something like that the book would never have been written but for the young South Indian.


===========================================================================

Funnelmelody

****************************************************************************************************************

http://images.smh.com.au/2010/01/25/1065860/Vowels-cartoon-420x0.jpg

Ask anyone at IIT KGP (except DB who knew me like the back of his hand and often had to apply cold cream) and they will certify that I am basically a simple chap. Indeed about a month back, I got a mail from our ex-HoD (MLM), my colleague there for forty years, stating that, after 'calibrating' me for that long, he concluded that I am 'simple, aloof and helpful'...I guess the three adjectives reinforce one another like the 3-D we live in...one can't be simple without being helpful and aloof etc.

Deviousness is not there in my character...although I used to refer to 'D.V.S. Sharma' as 'Devious Sharma'. I love to speak the way I write and vice versa. Unfortunately this trait of mine subjected me to constant humiliation, often in public.

It all started with my gushing: "I love Don Quixote" pronouncing it as: "Dawn Quicksote". One of my classmates at AU, who never read that book, or any other worthwhile book for that matter, laughed at me and corrected: It ought to be pronounced: "Dan kee-HO-tee" (He went to a Convent School).

From that day I developed a complex and keep quiet when in doubt, which is most of the time...except in the class room...I wrote a Ph D Thesis on Cherenkov Radiation, which spelling was preferred by my Guide SDM, although TIFR superfolks used to write Cerenkov Radiation. It turns out neither is right...Cherenkov (or for that matter Cerenkov) ought to be pronounced, I now see, as: "Chirengkof"...dash it, I mean...as Bertie would exclaim.

The limit was when I called Lieutenant precisely as it is written. And was laughed at by my own Father who corrected me: "Leftinent". And when I introduced Lt. Col. Sharma as: "Leftinent Colonel Sharma" in my Faculty Hostel at KGP, he took umbrage and corrected me: "Loo-tenant Carnal Sharam-a".

German (in which I have two Certificates a decade apart), I was told, has no hassles and is phonetic. Hitler is "Hit-ler", Goring is, "Goring"...well, not quite, there is an unpronounceable umlaut over his head; and Eva Braun is just: "Eva Brown"...not so, not so...it is: "Efa Braun"...since 'v' is pronounced as: 'f' in German (and 'bh' in Bengali).

What the heck! When I pronounced the Subject of 'Lust for Life', Vincent van Gogh, just as he is writ, they laughed and said something equally nonsensical. The right thing is: Give Up!:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLTQv8RH1TE


Then again when I uttered: San Jose as: "San Jose(ph)" they giggled and said: "San Ho Zay" and when I pronounced New Jersey as: "New Her Zay" they laughed again. And when my son returned from a fortnight's visit to Albuquerque, I asked him: "How is Albukwerkwe?" he laughed and said: "Albukirkee".

And when I said: "Jehovah", Edwin corrected me: "Yahweh"

Titlepiece

I forgot to talk about the title of this post.

It is taken from a rather romantic novel I read at a rather romantic age: "Joy in the Morning" by Betty Smith. The girl in that novel is not quite 'educated' and says: "funnelmelody" when she means: "fundamentally"


...Posted by Ishani


***********************************************************************************************************************************************

Sun & Shadows

============================================================================

While I was living in the Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP, there was this Senior Professor of Organic Chemistry just returned from a spell in Australia...of all places ;-) waiting for a Qrs to be allotted to him so he can bring his family from Calcutta. He was fond of playing Scrabble, which I detested as I felt it was child's play combining luck with spelling prowess.

My favorite word-game was Superghosts reinvented by Thurber and his crazy friends, before the advent of computers which spoil everything good. This game is like the good old parlor game of word-building except that you are permitted to prefix as well as suffix any letter you choose. As Thurber says:

"...Starting words in the middle and spelling them in both directions lifts the pallid pastime of Ghosts out of the realm of children's parties and ladies' sewing circles and makes it a game to test the mettle of the mature adult mind..."

For instance, say, it started off with a 't'. Instead of suffixing 't' with 's' making it 'ts' going towards 'tsunami' as in the old game of Ghosts, you derail it by prefixing 't' with 'z' making it 'zt' open both ways. And the mug sitting after you challenges and you come up with 'Aztec' (allowed since it is in Webster). That would be fun since, after the game is over, you will spend the whole night searching for all other words with 'zt' in the middle and go raving mad.

As Thurber puts it:

"The Superghost aficionado is a moody fellow, given to spelling to himself at table, not listening to his wife, and staring dully at his frightened children, wondering why he didn't detect, in yesterday's game, that 'cklu' is the guts of 'lacklustre', and priding himself on having stumped everybody with 'nehe', the middle of 'swineherd'..."

I was playing this mental game with my school-going nephews and nieces and they were quite enjoying it; and this Organic Chemist wanted me to play Scrabble...Anyway, since I didn't want to hurt him, I used to play his favorite game and lose always, to his utter satisfaction, since I could never play any board game...my attention wanders and I get bored (punny that!)...other than chalky blackboards.

Late one night, I was sitting on the lawn bench and smoking quietly, and he joined and asked me out of the blue:

"What is the main difference between life in Australia and life in India?"...meaning Calcutta ;-)

I said: "You won't see the Pole Star in Australia, and Southern Cross (Crux) in Calcutta."

And he shook his head on its spinal axis and asked me to try again. I then said: "Australia was a land of convicts when India was a land of thugs."

He then gave me a hint that he is referring to the difference between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

And I said: "Arts, Sciences, Literature, Religion, Wars, Torture Chambers were all invented in the Northern Hemisphere. The contribution of Australia is confined to help in plotting the shape of our Milky Way Galaxy...tough because it is like a worm sitting inside the spleen trying to figure out the shape of the entire human body."

He lost his patience and answered his own question:

"In India (read Calcutta) shadows are all to the North, while in Australia they are all to the South."

I then asked him if photography was his hobby. He said: "Yes!" and was quite impressed.

Organic Chemists and Organic Chemistry are weird. They will ask their students to mug up Markownikoff's Rule and cite exceptions to it, which are legions. And ask them to mug up Anit-Markownikoff's Rule. Physicists used to ask their students to mug up Swimming Man's Rule which has no exception at all other than Swimming Woman's, who like backstrokes.

Students of Chemistry at IIT KGP, my son tells me, were dichotomous (I too know ten-dollar words) towards their Organic Chemistry Building. They loved to specialize in it (that is where they thought money is) but were scared because they would be having access to all sorts of chemicals that were decidedly unhealthy. And it had prestige and only toppers could get projects in it. My son was nowhere near the top and so he got a Project under a youthful guide doing Computational Chemistry that eventually led him (my son) to his Bio-IT job. All that glitters is not gold...ask the Prince of Morocco.

Coming back to sun and shadows, Calcutta and KGP were on the Tropic of Cancer and that is why shadows are always to the North. Not in Gudur where I used to spend my summer vacation. On my wedding day, the 17th May, when I walked on its burning streets I couldn't see my shadow...it was all squeezed beneath my feet. Nor in Singapore or Kilimanjaro where shadows are this way and that equally often.

Well, March is here. I just Googled and learned that March Hares are synonymous with madness because it is their mating season...well, well, well; men are mad all seasons.

Hatters are reputed to be as mad as men because, apparently, in the good old days of Lewis Carroll, mercury was used in hat-making, so much so that mercury poisoning is known as "Mad Hatter's Disease".

Here is a curious item from wiki:

"On September 5, 1920, silent movie actress Olive Thomas ingested mercury capsules dissolved in an alcoholic solution at the Hotel Ritz in Paris. There is still controversy over whether it was suicide, or whether she consumed the external preparation by mistake. Her husband, Jack Pickford (the brother of Mary Pickford), had syphilis, and the mercury was used as a treatment of the venereal disease at the time. She died a few days later at the American Hospital in Neuilly."

============================================================================