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. magiceyeFebruary 6, 2023 at 10:59 AM

    Wonderful company on a journey!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathFebruary 6, 2023 at 11:32 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 6, 2023 at 4:30 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 6, 2023 at 6:23 PM

      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
47 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
15 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
13 comments
Read more

Nazneen’s Fate

N azneen is the protagonist of Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane (2003). Born in Bangla Desh, Nazneen is married at the age of 18 to 40-year-old Chanu Ahmed who lives in London. Fate plays a big role in Nazneen’s life. Rather, she allows fate to play a big role. What is the role of fate in our life? Let us examine the question with Nazneen as our example. Nazneen was born two months before time. Later on she will tell her daughters that she was “stillborn.” Her mother refused to seek medical help though the infant’s condition was critical. “We must not stand in the way of Fate,” the mother said. “Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate.” The child does survive as if Fate had a plan for her. And she becomes as much a fatalist as her mother. She too leaves everything to Fate which is not quite different from God if you’re a believer like Nazneen and her mother. When a man from another continent, who is more than double her age,...
6 comments
Read more