THE HACKNEYED THEOREM

Mathematics is a permanent disfigurement of your face, if you are born with a Euclid of a dad. All your childhood, you are supposed to figure out your own response mechanism to issues that concern you. As if life is a linear equation in two variables, with the other equation absent. Or, a right triangle with only the hypotenuse length known.

The scar is only compounded if you are not exactly a blessed athlete. And you somehow manage to turn your mortifying moments around. Like the 100 metres race in IInd grade where you finished joint last with a classmate who weighed 120 lbs. Or the ignominy of watching distraught as a kid from the neighbourhood gulped rat poison after her dad died. The numbers in your genes are supposed to turn every lowly 6 upside down into a greater 9 and grade every miserable feeling on the number line. As the father would say, you need to have an ever-calculative mind.

I have always believed that mathematicians make the lousiest of story-tellers, with the exception of Lewis Carroll. Their imagination is too stifled by logic. Once at a gathering, I took enormous pains to explain the significance of my T-shirt print (it said 69) to an interested on-looker. Soon, word would spread that the maths guy’s lad knew a little too much about things he shouldn’t know at his age. Sample my dad’s riposte to the significance of 69 – Like the number, the person remains the same even you turn him upside down, invert him laterally or look at him sideways.

Even the most ancient of fungi couldn’t have made the bread staler for me that evening.     

All said and done, the single most damnable trait of mathematically-inclined minds is their pathetic aversion to toe the unproven line. Research and statistics take precedence over desire while determining career options, whether it is for themselves or for their progeny. To them, the adage isn’t ‘Look before you leap” but instead somewhat like “Calculate and then follow.”  Risks are almost allergic, even the calculated ones.  I grew up being fed with the notion that daydreaming was the most rotten of my habits, since it hardly solved any purpose. Took me a while to realise that the only thing that ought to matter is whether I felt happy doing it. Never cook with number-infested minds; they will never let you deviate from the cookbook. 

This post is not meant to be a scathing indictment of all things numerical. In fact, there are so many of these caprices that I can’t seem to grow out of, most notably the counting of every stair I ascend. Or adding up the digits of every licence plate I see and check whether it is odd or even. Evens are favourable; odds are a tad quirky. There is this addictive methodology of determining prime numbers between 1 and 100; I forgot the name though. Reducing something to its lowest / naked terms is one of the most delectable of things, whether it is fractions or human figures. Infinity fascinates me, especially when you wonder how relevant would its idea be in a black hole. Calculus is something I could never decipher but I find in it an everlasting analogy for life. You differentiate and derive chapters from your past and integrate it into your present experiences. I can even predict the reply if I told my Dad about this thought-provoking insight: “Well your marks in calculus never evoked so much promise.” What is logical will always remain familiar; and will, therefore, continue to breed contempt. Infinitely.