Growing up with mathematics

During my childhood, the honour of the most hated subject by far would have gone to Mathematics. I might have stood probably a hundred times in front of my father for learning the intricacies of the subject, standing was essential to prevent the consequences of my stupid muddled brain. With exams on the morrow, none of nocturnal visits had turned out pleasant to me. A boxed ear and a red bum were the bare minimum results of these necessary excursions. My father after a tiring days’ work, would have preferred to have his piping hot tea in front of doordarshan rather than end up as the tutor of the makeshift tuition. Mother forced these meet-ups on both of us and thus my father had no choice but to become my examiner before the actual exams. Given that, I did my own thing in the exams, I’m surprised how I usually ended up doing it decently. Considered to be the decent bum in school, my repertoire of curses and swear words were limited, thus mathematics managed to save itself from my insistent assault on its roots.

A score of 40 out of 100 in mathematics during my fourth grade brought out loud lamenting gasps from my parents. I had just managed to scrape through and it was also probably the day, when their hidden dreams of seeing me as a big bombing scientist ended.  But, it was also a day of liberation for me, since the dreamy stars were now absent in my parents eyes. I jumped around carefree with joy. The red bum and the boxed ears still made their presence now and then, but I was free now or rather I had a smaller chain of expectation tied around me compared to the heavy clunking metal which I used to lug around before this incident.

It took a beautiful geometry teacher to finally pull me into the whirlpool of mathematics during high school. The classes were now pleasant, the curses were gone. Soft brain petals started crashing on the hard rock faces of mathematics. Asking intelligent doubts inside and after class had become essential. Temporarily there was total malfunction and I scored lesser in the following exams than what I would have normally scored by mugging the whole set of sums. Before things started to take a nasty turn, the teacher left and was promptly replaced by a dour grunting male.  The soft brain petals chose to stay at home and the hard rock faces were left unbothered for years together.

Pre-university was the phase wherein I had mastered the art of solving problems blindly. My soft spoken mathematics tuition tutor made his class solve a barrage of problems in his two hour class every day. With such practise even the dumbest fellows get a hang of the subject and so was the case with me. Every sub topic had a fixed set of different kinds of problems, once I became aware of that fact, the going became easy. With such coaching going on, I decided not to attend the college maths class completely. Our college teacher, a giant of a fellow seeing his class dwindle down from 3 digits to single digits must have taken offence, after the exam results were out, he caught me on a by-lane near my home. Being sure that I might have flunked in mathematics, he took a very aggressive tone and started giving me advice on the need to attend classes. He didn’t know that the ace was up my sleeve. When I finally revealed it, he looked like a chicken caught under headlights. Quickly he simmered down and went back to his previous mode and demanded where I had lost the six marks (score was 94 out of 100), I rolled over my eyes, probably he might have given Kejriwal a run for his money today.

Engineering finally started to bring out the soft brain petals from their cosy spots. This time it was more of an internal drive than an external stimulationJ.  Looking at signals and their behaviours through the eyes of mathematics was probably my first aha moment in mathematics. The soft petals began their painful journey from hard to soft.  Endless hours in library to grapple simple integration over the sine wave and what not and as expected, my score bombed in that subject. Half of my time during that semester was spent on this subject. But, more than the score, it was that momentary joy of having understood something very intricate using mathematics, pulled me towards it. I tried to bring in my intuitive interpretations to the equations, many times I failed but there were few times where I really felt satisfied.

When I read technical papers and see a bunch of equations, the first response is that of fleeing. The fight part of the brain requires some time to wake up and override the flee response.  The grind then begins. Many of these grinds have shown how much an important role mathematics place in explaining phenomenon that is hard to explain intuitively. Looking back, it feels funny that such an important subject is taught in schools with so much apathy. Even the teachers don’t seem to have an idea on the end goal of mathematics. Even now, probably due to my long standing hatred, mathematics doesn’t sit easily inside my head. It looks around as if it is an unwelcome guest, but I have now closed all the doors tightly to make it stay there and give myself a better chance in wooing it. It is too important a guest to let go and I hope one day it will feel at home.

Language Troubles

I have never been a language person; Even though I’m supposed to be eloquent in four languages and have the ability to understand a couple more, the hideous creature of language has always haunted me. Like the devils in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, my life has also seen many imaginary battles between the devils dwelling and hiding behind the letters, grammar and words of various languages.

The language which I first learnt, Tulu luckily has no script. Otherwise god only knows for how many more days and nights I would have had to be awake studying it. This being my mother tongue, I never had to put in a sweat to speak it, but this was just the beginning of the story. When I was sufficiently grown up to engage outsiders in a conversation I found out to my horror that there are many versions of Tulu. The version that I had learnt so seamlessly was known as the Shivalli tulu which is hardly spoken by less than 10% of the Tulu speaking populace. In fact with this statistic I was as good as dumb when I stepped out of my home. Even to this day the Tulu that I know is only Shivalli Tulu and I shamelessly use the same whenever I speak to the 90% of the startled non-Shivalli people. It is not only me who had this Tulu trouble; even my parents had a taste of it. My father is from Udupi and my mom’s home is near Sullia which are separated by about 100Km’s from each other and due to the theory of evolution the Shivalli language had also evolved into different branches. My parents could not make much sense of each other with their respective versions of Tulu after marriage and had to switch to Kannada, To my beautiful luck it was only a few months before I was born did they switch back to a newly created version of Tulu, freshly minted by combining the two versions and me being the first disciple of the new language.

English and Kannada suddenly started making their appearance in my life when I started attending the nursery school. Again speaking Kannada was never a problem but the written script had my head in splits. I with my simple mind could never figure out as to why and when I should go for the big letter compared to the smaller ones, the small streaks of lines which are put at the bottom of the letters always baffled me. I literally always took my chances on these underscore letters and used to get royally beaten up both at home and school. My best performance in Kannada came when I got 98 out of hundred in my first standard. Courtesy of this performance I also got the first rank which unfortunately was my last as well. My tryst with learning Kannada ended soon after I completed my fifth standard as my father got transferred to Ahmedabad. To be frank only once in these past 18 years, I went as far as writing a sentence in Kannada. One of my non-kannada friends in office had a Kannada maid at home and he wanted a note addressed to her saying that he didn’t want her to cook dinner for that day. Suddenly my mouth went dry and the old days of confusion and tension came flooding back. After a struggle of more than 5 minutes I did manage to write something. I guess the maid must have got the idea since my friend didn’t complain the next day. Even though my affiliation of writing in Kannada is almost dead and buried, this is not the case in terms of reading. I sometimes pickup the Kannada daily that comes to our home and I’m able to read at a pretty good pace. Over the last few years due to the influence of some pro-Kannada friends I have been reading Kannada novels. I have found them to be very different from the English ones as they are set in environments which are much familiar to us than the English ones. I hope to continue this association with Kannada over the course of my life.

I don’t exactly remember when I first learnt my ABCD’s but most probably I must have learnt it like a duck taking to water. It was only later in my life that English, which I was considering as my pet, started raising its ugly head. The world of tenses had me in a complete maze before twirling and twisting me into the endless realm of vocabulary. After studying in Bangalore at a pretty good school I went to Kendriya Vidyalaya in Ahmedabad. With the limited capabilities that the students possessed as far as English was concerned I soon became a star. I used to sweep all the debate and essay competitions. But nobody knew my dark secrets; I was a dud in terms of grammar. This mask was ripped apart when a harmless question in the class exposed me to the core. Our English teacher was asking a student to identify the tense of a sentence in the class; the student put his head down. Then came another students turn and the same posture was repeated. Finally the teacher after de-riling the class asked me to tell the correct answer, it seems I missed the mark by a very long shot since the teacher was flabbergasted with my reply and the whole class had to endure some 5 extra classes on the tenses. My affinity to the language grew with my interest in reading novels. Near my home in Ahmedabad there was a library called the Karnataka sangha, this was the place where Kannadigas who were feeling home sick used to have a get together. On one corner of this library there was a collection of English books. I started off my reading career from here. The first book that I read was the Arabian nights followed by the Hardy boys, the Nancy drews, Famous five and many of the Enid Blyton stories. She was my favorite writer at that time. After completing my 9^th standard we shifted back to Mysore and accordingly I shifted to the bigger Novels. My father had a small collection of Novels and among them was David Copperfield. As a young kid I was fascinated by the size of the book but could never go beyond the first page as the language was too heavy. It was in Mysore that I got into the world of Dickens, reading David Copperfield was like reading about a boy who was so like me, I was hooked. My dad had studied in the Mysore University and he still had his library card. After some persuasion, my dad took me to the library and got his card renewed. From the hallowed halls of this library I borrowed books ranging from Dickens, Dumas to Narayan. The world of books took me and swallowed me completely. Later on with the advent of internet and e-books, I used to download free novels on the net from Gutenberg and read it on the computer. I had read several big novels on the computer, looks almost impossible to me now. After joining my job, I started buying books. Now 7 years later I have a pretty good collection at home. This is a treasure I cherish a lot and get lost into whenever time permits.

Hindi was more or less a step-motherly language to me. I started swimming into the alphabets in my fifth standard in Bangalore but was soon thrown into the sea of Hindi when we moved to Ahmedabad. Staying afloat was getting difficult and had to struggle left right and center with endless beatings from my parents and late night studies. Finally I reposed whatever faith my parents had put on me by passing the mid-term exams. The struggles of choosing the right letters etc continued but it looked a lot easier to navigate in Hindi since it didn’t have the killer underscores unlike Kannada. Even after coming back to Mysore, I stuck to Hindi till 12^th standard.

Finally the language that gave me the shudders was Sanskrit. This was one language which used to puzzle me a lot, gave me nightmares and even after endless toil I was nowhere near understanding a proper sentence. After we moved into Ahmedabad in my first Sanskrit class I was asked to read a passage, I was rambling through the passage when the teacher showed me the stop signal. For the next 5 minutes, I was bombarded out of my wits and would have crawled through a mouse hole if I had the capability. Later my father had to come to the school to convince the teacher that I was starting fresh in the language and asked her to give me time, from that day onwards she didn’t point me out for any passage reading. It was only after some 3 years that my turn to read a passage came under the same teacher’s class, I pulled out no stops this time and rammed on the accelerator. The teacher was stunned and praised me like hell; she didn’t know that I had no idea about the meaning of the sentences though. With my sprouting but growing desire of reading the ancient Indian texts such as the Gita in their original form I have now in fact decided to give Sanskrit another chance. Hopefully this time I will be successful in grasping the language which is considered to be one of the ancient and the most complete languages.

Memories of Travel in Bangalore

When I lived in Bangalore as a Kid in the early 90’s, traffic was never a problem. I used to always reach my destinations without ever having to bother about a traffic hold up. It is another matter that I wouldn’t have bothered about it anyway, what with all the tensions and problems a 9 year old kid faces in his school and home. My school was located about 5 Km from my home and was considered to be a highly reputed one going by the amount of donation they collected. My daily means of travel to school was an Auto-Rickshaw which was stuffed with kids to the brim. Back then most of the roads were potholed and our Auto-Rickshaw driver would diligently run over all of them giving us a thrill which is unfathomable to this day. I used to call him Auto-man whereas the other kids called him Raju uncle, I don’t know why I chose the name Auto-man over uncle but he didn’t seem to mind it, probably thinking that I adored him with the likes of He-Man, Superman, Bat-man etc. Well, a highly unlikely possibility considering that the only man I really adored was Newman, whoever it was. A classmate of mine had described Newman in grotesque detail as having a steel body and laser eyes and I fell in love with him.

Auto-man had a chain of 3 Autos using which he catered to the students living in all parts of the city. He used to run one of the Autos himself and for the other two he had hired drivers. Even though he was always short of money, he used to occasionally treat us with a snack of raw mangoes or an Ice cream from the road side vendor. My mother would have fainted if she had seen me lapping up the ice cream with gusto. This was one information that I always kept out from the “What did I do today” speeches that I gave to my mother in the evenings. On rare occasions I was given the honor of sitting next to the Auto-man when he was driving. That was one of the most cherished locations in the Auto and every kid would die for a chance to sit there. Usually the high chair was reserved for the big boys but on a couple of occasions I did manage to corner it.

On quite a few occasions Auto-man didn’t turn up on time, putting into disarray the peace and tranquility of my family. I not wishing to lose out on a chance to get back on the adults and seeing the possibility of a holiday would scream that I would be punished for being late. Finally I would be bundled of into another Auto, pouring cold water on all my plans.

Sometimes my father would turn up on his Bajaj Super scooter to pick me up and to surprise me. On those days I was the envy of all the kids in the Auto, there was no comparison of riding on a Bajaj Super to that of an Auto. Couple of kids who stayed near my home would invariably jump ship to the scooter.

One fine day we moved into our new home built at the outskirts of the city. Auto-man didn’t have a network for this area so I ended up in a mini-van. The kids in the van were not kids but they were all mini-devils, fighting and bullying was common place. One day a kid brought a syringe with a needle attached to it inside the van. He sucked up water into the syringe from his water bottle and then declared that he was a doctor’s son and he can treat anybody. Finally it was the unlucky me who ended up getting treated, with the syringe stuck to my thumb. At first I cried and the others started laughing, seeing this I flew into a rage and banged the boy black and blue, the driver had to stop the vehicle to separate us. That was the final day for me on the mini-van. I’m sure that if I visit any jail today I will come across one of those guys there.

Next came the BMTC bus travel. With only the mini-van catering to my area this was the only option available. My mom would give me two 50 paisa coins for the to and fro journey and would instruct me to get in and out of the bus only through the front door so that the driver can ensure that I have climbed in or out safely. The bus conductors as usual were as unpredictable as they are today. Some of them used to give me tickets, some of them would just take my money and would not give me the ticket and some of them would take the 50 paisa coin and would give me in return a 25 paisa coin. I loved this third group of conductors the most. In a week I used to save a couple of 25 paisa coins this way. With this money I used to buy stickers from the forlorn sticker seller who used to sit outside our school gates or sweets and toffees from a nearby sweet shop. I started to love this arrangement more than anything else because now for the first time I had money power.

Finally as they say, all good things must come to an end. After only three months of enjoying the BMTC travel my father got transferred to Ahmedabad. It was time to say good bye to a phase of Bangalore, which I never found again when I returned back.