Skip to main content

Common Sense

 


“Are you interested in popular science books?” He asked me as I put down Carlo Rovelli’s Reality is Not What It Seems in my lap to think about what I had just read: “… great science and great poetry are both visionary, and may even arrive at the same intuitions. Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.” That was what had caught my attention particularly. That was very much in tune with my own thinking. I took interest in science precisely for this reason.

I told the fellow passenger the same. He was impressed. We were both on a train.

“My name is Ananthapadmanabhan,” he said. “Pretty long, isn’t it? They call me Pappu, for short.” And he laughed. The name Pappu is in North India what Sasi is in Kerala: Dunce.

“People like to compartmentalise truths,” Pappu said when I told him about my limited interest in science. “It makes life easier. Use science for practical life and religion for morality and poetry for beauty. Pretty easy. If only we would care to realise that all these are not so conveniently separated systems.”

“It is because of these compartmentalisations that we have so many problems,” I reflected loud.

“Indeed,” Pappu conceded readily. “Just imagine the religious bigot applying physics to his fervour.”

“Physics would have provided a better trajectory to his heaven.”

Thus went on the conversation until Pappu gave me a classical problem to work out.

“Two trains start from opposite stations, say Station A and Station B, at the same time. The distance between A and B is 150 km. The trains move at the same uniform speed of 50 kmph. A bird starts flying too from Station A at the same time at the uniform speed of 100 kmph. When the bird reaches Train B, it turns around and flies back to Train A. When it reaches A, it turns back again and flies to B. And so on. How much distance will the bird have flown when the trains pass each other?”

I had worked out similar problems as a young man. I used physics and simple arithmetic for that. Here too I set upon thinking in the same way. When the trains travel 50 km each, the bird will have flown 100 km. So the bird reaches Train B at its 100th km. The trains are still 50 km away from each other when the bird turns around. Now the bird will fly around 33 km (double of what each train will run) to reach Train A and the trains will have moved some 17 km each. A bit of arithmetic will tell us that the bird will fly distances of 100 + 33 + 11 + 4 + 1 km (approximately) which adds up to 150 km.

“That is quite a mindboggling arithmetic,” Pappu said. “You made it very complicated by bringing in geometric progression and all that stuff. It’s much simpler, you know. See. The trains are moving at the same uniform speed of 50 kmph. It means they will meet exactly in the middle of the total distance. That is at 75km. The bird’s speed is just the double of each train’s. So when each train covers 75 km, the bird will have flown 150 km.”

Cute, I thought.

“Very often we make things complicated unnecessarily,” Pappu said. “If only we make use of our common sense, life would be much simpler.”

Our train was approaching the next station where Pappu was to alight.

“Remember D H Lawrence?” He gave me a parting shot. “I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.”

Comments

  1. Similar thing is said about science and spirituality that they meet eventually.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hari OM
    Rajeev made my point, so I can only add, what a delightful read today! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you. But we don't come across Pappus every day. 😊

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...