Asymmetric Cataract

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

http://www.doctorsecrets.com/images/cataracts.gif

Whoever said:

"Two eyes are better than one"

didn't have asymmetric cataract.

It all started about five years back. I was merrily walking along the high street of my small town Gudur one night. The street lights were bright and attracted many insects. One of them hit my left eye making me to close it. I then found that I could only see hazily through my right eye, with about, say, 70% clarity.

When by and by I opened my left eye, all was fine. A few more trials of squinting, with women gazing suspiciously, I saw that the right eye was sort of playing truant.

I straight went to the chamber of the only eye-doctor who was swatting mosquitoes and thinking of shutting shop for the day.

I offered myself to him and asked him to just tell me if I have cataract in my right eye.

He shone his torch light (which needed periodic blows from behind) here and there and announced that I had no cataract as far as he could see...which was not very far. I asked him how much is his fees and he felt shy and asked me to have a sight-test. I said ok; and after making me read the chart (which I had memorized by then) he gave me a prescription (which I dumped) and took Rs 30 (thirty only).

Returning to Hyderabad, my wife asked me what is wrong with me...why I was always closing one eye and then the other every once in a while looking at her lovely figure. I then told her what happened at Gudur, and she drove me to the nearest eye-specialist in Ameerpet. By then the haziness in the right eye had increased to about 50%.

When I went into his chamber, he was reading the stocks and shares pages of DC. When I told him that I am a retired Professor of IIT (to impress him), he replied that he too is retired Professor of Ophthalmology from Osmania Medical College (to impress me). I then asked him to just tell me if I have cataract in the right eye.

He had a better 'scope' than the Gudur torch light and he shone it in my eyes repeatedly asking me to close one and open the other and look left, right, front, up and down and pronounced that I had no cataract. I asked him why the hell my right eye is hazy. He replied that I just have 'senile vision impairment' and asked me to take Vitamn tablets.

But he was too shy to charge me anything...us Retired Professors stick together.

I pushed a Rs 100 Note in his pocket and he was glad.

Within another year, the sight in the right eye was making its presence (or absence?) cruelly...I was always squinting and testing, and it became a nasty habit, troubling every onlooker.

And I couldn't read PGW anymore...that was when I started blogging...which doesn't require sight other than that of the inner eye.

My son drove me to the best corporate clinic, where the ma'am examined my eyes with a hi-tech compu-thing and declared that I have cataract in both eyes, one 80% and the other 20%. And she advised that I get both of them surgically corrected at once before I go as blind like a bat @ Rs 30,000 for each separately and @ Rs 50,000 as a package deal.

My son was almost swiping his credit card, when I kicked him on his shin and her on her feet and ran like a bat out of hell.

My son caught up with me after a chase of 200 meters and asked me what happened.

I replied that I am not going to entrust my eyes to a ma'am in overalls that is as outspoken as her. And I will get any surgery done only after one of them goes 100% blind...no risk then, except painful infection.

It is now two years and I discovered by myself that there is what is called Ctrl+++++++

Happy as ever...

What is the trouble now?

Any asymmetry in binocular vision is magical. With the left eye open and the right closed, I can read fine print on the medicine bottles. But with both eyes open, I just can't even read the headlines of ToI.

I can only term it as 'ophthalmic interference'.

It is like trying to drive a car with the right wheels punctured but the left ok. It pulls.

But who wants to read at this age when one can write famously?


...Posted by Ishani


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

Pratik's Invite

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

Pratik writes:

Dear gps,

Soon you may receive the hard copy of the invitation.

(or invite? Of late I'm seeing `invite' everywhere instead of `invitation'!).

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

gps:

Pratik is a literary prude like Jeeves and frowns upon such flirt with Queen's English.

What is wrong with such back-forms when they result in helpful abbreviates? They in fact result in enormous simplifies of the tough foreign tongue.

I am like Bertie and I am full of appreciate that does not deserve any critical examine. But Pratik is ancient in his ethics and has no tolerate for such linguistic abominates.

Even when he was a student, I am told, he was a personify of honesty in his Physics Lab. We, on the other hand at our AU, were too lazy to take readings and used to be experts in back-calculates and several types of heinous approximates. There was a severe limitate to our rigor and we believed in an apply of least act.

Anyway, Pratik gave a sumptuous dinner invite to me and my wife when we were at KGP last year.

And we started talking about the Jumbo Physics Course (of which I was the primeval origin or so to say the primate).

He asked me if I used Power Point Present.

I said 'no'; my expertise in Computer Applies was rudimentary. I am happy with mental calculate.

I said I started with Simple Harmonic Oscillate, Damned (sorry, Damped) Harmonic Oscillate, Forced Harmonic Oscillate, Coupled Oscillate and Propagate of pulses.

And I loved Fraunhofer Diffract and Fresnel Diffract (which was a bugbear to many).

Also, Linear Polarize, Circular Polarize and Elliptical Polarize, and the Analyze of a mixture of their various combines.

And then passed on to the celebrated Schrodinger Equate.

By then my students were suffering from severe mental dehydrate and had to be shifted to the B C Roy Hospital for administer of several bottles of saline, which they thought were free from contamine.

Poor chaps living in their own paradigms (Ha!).

Before I quit KGP, I tried to improve the educate of Pratik on the topic of invigilate of central examines. As every veteran of the IIT System knows, there are several rungs of cheating from consult, inscribe, subscribe, superscribe on various body parts, dresses, clip boards and toilet walls depending on the exasperate of the student. Also exchange, interchange, barter, and outright copy-paste of the examine scripts.

I tried to convince him that the punishment must be proportional to the crime, both going hand in hand in synergy, the proportionality constant ranging from 0 to 100% depending on various extraneous factors like the temperature and humidity of the Examine Control Room.

In Life one should not be idealistic but develop some attenuate of moral standards. Just like gold becomes useless if you insist on 100% purity, mind also needs some measure of adulterate.

While grading answer scripts and vivas too, one has to exercise some amount of selective exaggerate.

While giving Recos too, one has to indulge in selective amplify, distort, mitigate, ameliorate, adumbrate, obfuscate, prevaricate, fabricate, duplicate, insinuate, and pure and simple falsificate without any hesitate.

That's all folks for tonight... I am suffering from severe intellectual complicates.


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

Thurber on Ross

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

Had a truly hectic day.

Slept last night (morning) at 6 AM and Ishani got me out of bed at 8.30 AM to play ball with her.

Then my son drove me along with him to our Nile Valley Township to inspect the kitchen sink extension; and it was 3 PM by the time we were back.

And Ishani was ready.

Another fond trip to Nile Valley in the evening with lifelong friends.

And so on...

In this job of daily blogging, I cheat whenever I don't get time for an original blog by lifting something or the other from Google.

Here is Thurber on Ross.

Thurber is Thurber, while Harold Ross was his Editor at New Yorker where Thurber published most of his work.

They were a weird pair, unique species of the Author-Editor symbiosis.

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

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5003/the-art-of-fiction-no-10-james-thurber

INTERVIEWER

You say that your drawings often don’t come out the way you intended?

THURBER

Well, once I did a drawing for The New Yorker of a naked woman on all fours up on top of a bookcase—a big bookcase. She’s up there near the ceiling, and in the room are her husband and two other women. The husband is saying to one of the women, obviously a guest, “This is the present Mrs. Harris. That’s my first wife up there.” Well, when I did the cartoon originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and instead of getting in the stairs when I drew my line down, there she was stuck up there, naked, on a bookcase.

Incidentally, that cartoon really threw The New Yorker editor, Harold Ross. He approached any humorous piece of writing, or more particularly a drawing, not only grimly but realistically. He called me on the phone and asked if the woman up on the bookcase was supposed to be alive, stuffed, or dead. I said, “I don’t know, but I’ll let you know in a couple of hours.” After a while I called him back and told him I’d just talked to my taxidermist, who said you can’t stuff a woman, that my doctor had told me a dead woman couldn’t support herself on all fours. “So, Ross,” I said, “she must be alive.” “Well then,” he said, “what’s she doing up there naked in the home of her husband’s second wife?” I told him he had me there.

INTERVIEWER

But he published it.

THURBER

Yes, he published it, growling a bit. He had a fine understanding of humor, Ross, though he couldn’t have told you about it. When I introduced Ross to the work of Peter de Vries, he first said, “He won’t be good; he won’t be funny; he won’t know English.” (He was the only successful editor I’ve known who approached everything like a ship going on the rocks.) But when Ross had looked at the work he said, “How can you get this guy on the phone?” He couldn’t have said why, but he had that bloodhound instinct. The same with editing. He was a wonderful man at detecting something wrong with a story without knowing why.

INTERVIEWER

Could he develop a writer?

THURBER

Not really. It wasn’t true what they often said of him —that he broke up writers like matches—but still he wasn’t the man to develop a writer. He was an unread man. Well, he’d read Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and several other books he told me about—medical books—and he took the Encyclopedia Britannica to the bathroom with him. I think he was about up to H when he died. But still his effect on writers was considerable. When you first met him you couldn’t believe he was the editor of The New Yorker and afterward you couldn’t believe that anyone else could have been. The main thing he was interested in was clarity. Someone once said of The New Yorker that it never contained a sentence that would puzzle an intelligent fourteen year old or in any way affect her morals badly. Ross didn’t like that, but nevertheless he was a purist and a perfectionist and it had a tremendous effect on all of us: It kept us from being sloppy. When I first met him he asked me if I knew English. I thought he meant French or a foreign language. But he repeated, “Do you know English?” When I said I did he replied, “Goddamn it, nobody knows English.” As Andy White mentioned in his obituary, Ross approached the English sentence as though it was an enemy, something that was going to throw him. He used to fuss for an hour over a comma. He’d call me in for lengthy discussions about the Thurber colon. And as for poetic license, he’d say, “Damn any license to get things wrong.” In fact, Ross read so carefully that often he didn’t get the sense of your story. I once said: “I wish you’d read my stories for pleasure, Ross.” He replied he hadn’t time for that.

INTERVIEWER

It’s strange that one of the main ingredients of humor—low comedy—has never been accepted for The New Yorker.

THURBER

Ross had a neighbor woman’s attitude about it. He never got over his Midwestern provincialism. His idea was that sex is an incident. “If you can prove it,” I said, “we can get it in a box on the front page of The New York Times.” Now I don’t want to say that in private life Ross was a prude. But as regards the theater or the printed page he certainly was. For example, he once sent an office memorandum to us in a sealed envelope. It was an order: “When you send me a memorandum with four-letter words in it, seal it. There are women in this office.” I said, “Yah, Ross, and they know a lot more of these words than you do.” When women were around he was very conscious of them. Once my wife and I were in his office and Ross was discussing a man and woman he knew much better than we did. Ross told us, “I have every reason to believe that they’re s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g together.” My wife replied, “Why, Harold Ross, what words you do spell out.” But honest to goodness, that was genuine. Women are either good or bad, he once told me, and the good ones must not hear these things.

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

Bring Change!

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

The other day there was a sad news item for me that said India Mint will no longer mint the 25 paise coins (called 'pavala' in our lingo)...They are being phased out.

Sad because I happen to have one such coin in my pant pocket for the last decade or so...other coins may have fled and been replaced but this one remained there changing from pant to pant...maybe one day I can auction it to a crazy numismatist.

But, seriously, there were two big issues with this lovely coin:

1. A decade or more ago, the ubiquitous India Post Card was costing 25 paise. And then our Papa Ambani declared that he dreams of a day when poor people can call their friends and relatives on their cell phones at the cost of a post card. I wish he were alive today...the post card now costs, I think, 50 paise, while the call cost on some 'offers' could be less than 5 paise per minute.

2. The late lamented CM of AP, YSR, launched a bold and popular scheme for the benefit of the much abused village womenfolk. He arranged for them a 'pavala vaddi' that translates to '3% interest'...you can work it out yourself or take the help of the local Kabuliwala of Rabin Babu. Now, the 'pavala' has gone the way of YSR, sadly, and I suspect, politics being the nasty game it is, his 'pavala vaddi' scheme (or scam?) will follow suit.

British are funny folks; and the most funny part of their psyche is their Class System.

While they were ruling India, there were as many as 4 classes in their trains in India (apart from their saloons): First Class, Second Class, Inter Class and Third Class. I did travel by their Inter Class and Gandhiji by their Third Class.

In our childhood, we had to mug up their absolutely crazy coin system...here is a sample:

1/4 farthing, 1/3 farthing, 1/2 farthing, farthing, half-penny, penny, two-pence, three-pence, groat, six-pence, shilling, florin, half-crown, crown, sovereign (pound) and guinea.

Why is it crazy?

Because, for example, sovereign is 20 shillings, while the superstitious guinea is 21 shillings...ok?

And they tried their 'level' best (what is 'level' about it, I never could fathom) to introduce an equally formidable coinage in their British India...that was the starting point of my downfall in mathematics.

We had this solid Rupee. It was very heavy and could tear the owner's cotton pocket if he had one of each...I mean a Rupee coin as well as a pant.

The Rupee was round and made of pure silver. Here my metallurgical cousin of BHU would scold me that there is nothing called a 'pure' metal. Anyway, it was pure enough.

This basic thing had in it 64 pice. Each pice was round and made of pure copper (sorry Brother!).

Going upwards, there was a 2- pice coin, and a 4-pice coin called 1 Anna which was round enough but had some fancy corrugations on its circumference, I don't know why. Then there was a 2- anna coin which was not round; it was sort of square or pentagon or may even be hexagon, I forget. This was called affectionately: 'beda' or 'paraka' depending on which district of the forthcoming (and likely to be hindgoing) AP. The beauty of this coin is that there used to be carts carrying all sorts of sundry items from pocket combs to spoons dangling from their columns, each priced one 'beda'...pick up any, no bargaining please!

Then we had the 4-anna coin that is our 'pavala' that was round and sweet and the 8-anna coins that were as rare as Associate Professors at IIT during my time there.

Going downwards, we had 1/3-pice and 2/3 pice.

During the war, when the losing British wanted copper badly for their guns, I suppose, the half-anna coins went annular. My Father was using them as washers in his tool-kit.

I think that is as much British craziness as we could get.

Then, Nehrujee decided that we should start going decimal and started issuing 'naya paise' each of which was 1/100 of one Rupee (that had by then as much silver as my brain has math).

Now, the fun starts...there were elaborate conversion tables issued and dangling from the necks of bus conductors. This is formidable task for any math giant...try making up 'equivalence charts' between 1/64 and 1/100...I have seen fisticuffs between bus conductors and University Students over the fractional difference and who should 'round it up' and for whose benefit.

Britain followed India, for once, and went decimal in their coins...an achievement indeed.

But their former colony that declared Independence and called itself the USA went decimal long before us in their coinage.

But they are doggedly sticking to their 'miles' and perhaps 'gallons' too...while we are more progressive and use liters and right-hand-drive.

I now come to my lifelong bugbear...it is called Units and Dimensions in Physics and its First Chapter.

We had fps, cgs, MKS, SI, esu, emu, Gaussian, Heaviside-Lorentz, rationalized, irrrationalized, natural, artificial, atomic...and boring stuff.

And it was my misfortune that I had to learn and teach EM from Starling to Sakurai.

Interconversion of Units was one of the reasons I quit Physics at the first excuse.

Nowadays in Hyderabad, I see everywhere on every Counter the placard:

"Bring Change!"

But from where?

The Banks have gone bankrupt in change.

The only source of 'change' is the 'solicitors' of coins sitting outside every temple.

I have seen one woman selling coins worth hundreds of rupees to the Medical Shop Dealer at the rate of 1 Rupee = 90 Paise.

Very enticing Profession for Unemployed Pensioners!

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

Barter System

In 2005 when I first landed in this crazy city, a cup of tea in a wayside tea-stall cost Rs 1.50. When I tendered a 2 Rupee coin, the boy 'manning' the counter nonchalantly returned a toffee to me in lieu of the 50 paise coin.

The next day, after I had my cup of tea, I gave him a one-rupee coin and his toffee back.

He dropped the toffee in his coin counter and then realized what went on, looked at my stony face breaking into a smile, and reciprocated it.


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

Selling Places

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

Saswat writes from NYC:

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

Dear Sir,

Was reading your latest blog and upon reading the sentence ".. has no character .. like one of your US cities", I was about to protest but in the next line you mentioned "except NYC .. ". :)

A colleague of my wife (from the omnipresent Thomson-Reuters) from London is visiting NYC and she said NYC is like London on drugs. Of course, I have never been to London. But now I have some strange mental pictures of London being like NYC but without drugs!

From your description of Hyd, I am also feeling an itch to go see it during Ramzan. Of course, NY or London, none of them really compare with the Indian cities.

As I said before, I have real trouble at any place except NYC because this is as close as it gets to Indian cities...


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

gps:

I don't even have a passport and I travel very rarely.

But I do have mental pictures of places from reading about them from great authors (other than Travel Agents).

RKN wrote about NYC too. And said it has everything on earth...including many tiny Malgudis. And that he is very comfortable there despite being asked: "Black or Cream?" in a bustling breakfast joint.

And many have said that if you are bored with NYC, you are bored with life.

The self-confessed lecherous Sardarjee also wrote approvingly of NYC.

Soumchak wrote to me after his first visit to NYC that it was as if he came to a very familiar city...he had seen the Manhattan skyline dozens of times in Hollywood Movies.

For me NYC means New Yorker, Thurber, Herald Ross, Dorothy Parker and the once- famous Algonquin Round Table. I read that the Hotel conducts walking tours of the places where those celebrities lived and worked.

Of course, as Saswat says, it is the teeming people that makes it homely. If you remove the crowd it would be as barren as any other US city. Every Indian who visits the typical US city (including RKN) says how boring they are; mostly bereft of crowds in the streets.

I am told that the exception is Boston. My Boston is about 2 centuries old, since I read the Autocrat half a dozen times in as many decades.

And my friend NP says, after a visit there, that it is the student crowd that appeals to him. RKN said the same thing of Berkeley too. There is something charming about youngsters going to school. Come to Hyderabad which teems with schools and colleges and universities. The place is very young. Urchins with school kits being downloaded from the yellow school buses.

And, if you remove the student crowd from KGP, as in winter and summer vacations, it is a dead place. The best time to visit KGP is the first week of April, around Good Friday.

I think I sold KGP to at least two people who never saw it.

One is the Bostonian EFT from MIT. Over two decades of chatty mails, he was pining to visit KGP but was forbidden from visiting India on medical grounds (two decades ago). He had a triple bypass.

In a strange reversal of roles, Americans would now like to flock to Hyderabad on medical tourism, upsetting Obama very much. You name it, and you have it in Hyderabad; from the latest Varian Medical Systems like Lineacs and Rapid Arcs for cancer treatment (in which Arundhuti at Stanford is an expert) and bypass surgeries without hacksaws (keyhole), all affordable to Americans half way round the world.

But of course Edwin is right...if he drinks a glass of water here, he would need a score of saline bottles (with all sorts of molds and fungi). We however are immunized from childhood.

The other gent to whom I sold KGP is a CBS alumnus and friend of Aniket, whom I never met. He wrote a while ago:

"While in Kolkata, I did follow your blog post, though not so regularly as I used to while in Weizmann, where one of the first things that I used to do in the morning was to check your recent blog post. I wanted to do that here too, but family matters kept me busy in one way or the other. Soon you will find an audience of your blog from Lyon, France."


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

As for London, It is my home town.

From Class Six onwards (I have been to London to look at the Queen) England was etched in every story and novel. And RKN said he kept his English school text with its misty Tower Bridge picture for 40 odd years.

In my teens I read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and was transported.

And of course, Pickwick Papers, Sherlock Holmes, PGW...and latest the Dairy of a Nobody gifted by Pratik.

I have an open invite to visit London...but I am happy with my London. I am sure I was a Londoner in one of my endless chain of rebirths...recycled DNA.

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

But everyone loves his city of childhood.

Thurber has his Columbus, Ohio.

After young Rajiv Gandhi's Address to the US Senate House,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOJO3s3n51M

he was asked which city he liked best; and without batting an eyelid, he replied: 'Delhi', to the laughter of all his audience who perhaps expected 'NYC'.

...And I... I like Muthukur...


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

Don is Welcome!

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

DonQuixote has left a new comment on your post "Don's Fantasy":

Dear Sir,

On my next visit home, summer 2012 , I intend to experience that charm! Some Biryani, auto-ride with a 'knowledgeable' driver and may be even a visit to Chinthal Basti!

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

Wonderful!

But summer is cruel in Hyderabad. It is hot and dry and tiresome.

The best time to visit Hyderabad is the last week of Ramzan. The city is a different place then. Much like Calcutta on Saptami Day of DP.

Ramzan is in the air then. The New City called Cyberabad, shabbily, has no character. It is just like any one of your US cities, other than NYC and Boston as my son tells me.

The Old City preserves its muslim character; and the best part of it comes through during Ramzan. The all-night shopping around the brilliantly lit Charminar, I am told, is a sight to watch.

There is Peace in the soul of the city, and the simplicity of the Hyderabadi Muslim then is so different than everything else.

And the new city adds its cosmopolitan charm.

This evening I was holding my li'l Ishani and strolling around our upcoming Nile Valley Township. An obviously Telugu 'domestic help' tried to chat up Ishani and asked her a few questions like; "What is your name? Have you had khana? What did you eat?.."

And Ishani being the dot product of an IITian countered her with: "What is your name?"...etc in her own Telugu.

The maid was so charmed and blurted out:

"All kids here are Hindi-speaking, damn them!"


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

Don's Fantasy

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

Sometime back, DQ said, rather lyrically:

"...The mention of Hyderabad evokes in me the charm of the Nizams. The nuanced culture and sophistication they have become synonymous with. May be now, that Hyderabad exists only in our fantasies but that will do for me..."

So, here is a Nizamia Item from today's ToI by Mir Ayub Ali Khan:

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

"Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad and Santiniketan near Kolkata may be in far flung corners, but they have an interesting connect that harks back to the time of the Seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan.

(...gps: See http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2011/07/bangle-sellers.html )


Both were given a fresh lease of life by him.

Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore is said to have visited Hyderabad himself twice, seeking financial assistance for Santiniketan. The Nizam first granted 1 lakh British rupees and later added it with another 1.25 lakh rupees. With 2.25 lakh rupees, Tagore established the Persian Chair in the institute...

Ajanta Caves, on the other hand, was the most noted contribution of the Nizam who took keen interest in the conservation, protection and documentation of the first and second century BC paintings in the caves. The Ajanta Caves came under the then Hyderabad state.

...Incidentally, all the Ajanta Cave paintings have been replicated by an artist and are on display in State Museum in Public Gardens in Hyderabad.

Revealing his secular side, the Seventh Nizam also gave an annual grant for 10 years for the publication of the Mahabharata in Sanskrit by a Pune-based institute in 1930s.

...He also paid a total of 32,500 rupees for the construction of the guest house for the institute."

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

gps: How did the Nizams get all their money?

Simple...from the fabulous diamond exports from Golconda, a stone's throw from my apartment....some stone though...

Here is some tidbit about the Koh-i-Noor diamond from wiki:

"It is believed that the Koh-i-Noor carries with it a curse and only when in the possession of a woman will the curse not work. All the men who owned it have either lost their throne or had other misfortunes befall them. Queen Victoria is the only reigning monarch to have worn the gem. According to the legend, if the monarch is a male, the stone is passed to his spouse.

The possibility of a curse pertaining to ownership of the diamond dates back to a Hindu text relating to the first authenticated appearance of the diamond in 1306: "He who owns this diamond will own the world, but will also know all its misfortunes. Only God, or a woman, can wear it with impunity." All the owners of the Koh-i-noor have had a tragedy befall them."


So, Don Garu: When are you visiting our Nizam's Hyderabad?

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