On The Ning Nang Nong

All the talk on playfulness and feminine memento incidentally interweave in the book by Edna Kramer that I am reading. The book "Main Stream of Mathematics" is the historical and anecdotal account of the evolution of mathematics.

Chapter#1 begins in India with mathematician Bhaskara and his daughter Lilavati.

The author narrates the story of the scuppered marriage of Lilavati and Bhaskara's resolves thereupon to endow her precocious and mathematically-gifted daughter with his teachings and immortalize her through his works. Thus, was written Lilavati.





What is ambiguous to me is the meaning of "Lila". Edna translates that "Lila" as "beautiful" but other authentic translators invest in a nuanced Sanskrit, Līlā = play, vatī = female possessing the quality. I don't know if "lila" is "play" or "beauty", nevertheless the work remains playful enough between the father and daughter. Luden Mathematica? Still confounding to me ..lila is beauty or play?

Many of the problems are addressed to Līlāvatī herself who must have been a very bright young woman. For example "Oh Līlāvatī, intelligent girl, if you understand addition and subtraction, tell me the sum of the amounts 2, 5, 32, 193, 18, 10, and 100, as well as [the remainder of] those when subtracted from 10000." and "Fawn-eyed child Līlāvatī, tell me, how much is the number [resulting from] 135 multiplied by 12, if you understand multiplication by separate parts and by separate digits. And tell [me], beautiful one, how much is that product divided by the same multiplier?"

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LPJL seem to be a spirited army! Re: Victorian advert, I am thrilled by the cultural stride over the ubiquity of sanitary towel in consumer market. No longer are these hygienic towels dispensed only by ladies for ladies. Today, you can walk into any pharmacy and grab a packet and pay at the cashier (who can happen to be a man also).

While the West was fidgeting with discretion and modesty over the sanitary towel, we Indians from the East are a different kettle of fish. We were grappling with superstitious customs. Those three days! Women should not touch, women should not pray, so forth. We have marched a long way in surmounting modesty and thrashing superstition yet anytime I pass by inquiry on gamma radiation and negative energy of menstruation, I am amused that superstition is still so rife even in literate communities.

Women should not confuse atomic physics with biological reproduction, if they do, there's risk of irradiation in our sewage canals.

 

No time, so just scratched rough.

 

It is not just the filigree on the pad but the (paper) wrapper is an intricate cubist artwork. Colors and interlocking geometric figures! Many years ago, while waiting for my flight at the airport, I happened to notice a tiny box from the paned-window of the airport pharmacist. I asked : what is this? She replied: to carry (discretely) sanitary napkins to the lavatory.



Seriously? Are you kidding me? A coming-of-age girl is flashed on the box to keep it discreet. O' there are also very thoughtful crows depicted to mislead into thinking that crow-chow is stocked in that box and a lady is carrying this box to the loo to feed the airborne crows from the lavatory window. Why don't they paint some Richard Attenborough's turtles to administer 'genuine' discretion?

Nevertheless, I bought it and also tested it. I asked a (friend) bloke in India: can you identify the purpose of this box from surface reading? He inspected. 'I think for cosmetic maskara-waskara type ..or to store hair pins?'

There is only so much confusion that Iravati can take. May be the camouflage works on these dopey men!

 

Food trail: Veg Pulav

Moms are the sole creatures who wake up at 6 AM to cook biryanis. My mom is one such early cook who would pack my lunch by 7 AM whilst the dissolute me plots to skip school and continue watching the cartoons. But when my lunch box was ready even before I brushed my teeth, my ingenious tricks were foiled by my stickler mom. Your lunch box is ready, you better get ready.

In that memory lane, a delicacy carried very often to school was biryani/pulav. My mom staunchly affirms that rice for lunch stays springy and aromatic only in biryanis. I never doubted why I was chubby whilst growing up. Lunch-box pulavs were toned down recipes of the more elaborate (masala grind) recipes of the weekend. Nevertheless, they are tasty and enjoyable.

I had plans to dine out today, biryani. I weighed myself this morning and thought: Ira, better cook at home healthy and light biryani over that weight. So, here it is!

 

Illusions are gratifying! I trump up the feeling of eating less from the small-sized bowl though in five servings I emptied the large-sized bowl.

Japanese and their pouches are still reasonable! Polka dots may be playful (luden) and dicey distraction.

Back then, in Indian grassroots, the kirana-store uncles would discreetly swaddle Stayfree and Whisper with used newspaper, which always puzzled me. Doesn't the cover-up defeat the purpose when that newspaper bundle has become known 'discreetly' for what it stands for? Till date, the shadowy ingenuity of that thoughtful gesture flusters me. In an attempt to hush lady-things, the toiletry sell was made more pronounced. Even a no-brainer infers that newspaper-wrapped, bricked-up, hushed and coy contraption toted by that girl/woman.

 

Aircraft legs to buggy wheels

Women are prone to lament that men hardly grasp the problems of women. Trust me, they do. They do more than women do and action on it. Consider our Owen Maclaren who invented a contraption that changed our lives.

"Owen Finlay Maclaren, (1907 – 13 April 1978) was the inventor of the lightweight baby buggy with a collapsible support assembly and founder of the Maclaren company. He designed Spitfire undercarriage legs when working for Maclaren Undercarriage Company Ltd, and while living in West Drayton, Middlesex. In 1944, he retired from aeronautical design, forming the company Andrews Maclaren that manufactured aircraft components.

The former test pilot and designer of the Supermarine Spitfire undercarriage was inspired when his daughter visited from the United States with his first grandchild. After watching the parents struggle with the clumsy conventional pushchair, he used his knowledge of lightweight, collapsible structures to create a new generation of infant transport and inspire the design of future collapsible objects such as the Strida bicycle."


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Today, the buggy wheel is symbolic of an efficient motherhood. But, behind that woman's liberation was a man's painstaking invention.

 

Till life do us part

I was reading the essays of Claude Bernard (1813 – 1878) and was fascinated with the man's theories on experimental medicine. I pulled up his biography to know more about him.

"Bernard practiced vivisection, to the disgust of his wife and daughters who had returned at home to discover that he had vivisected their dog. The couple was officially separated in 1869 and his wife went on to actively campaign against the practice of vivisection. His wife and daughters were not the only ones disgusted by Bernard's animal experiments. The physician-scientist George Hoggan spent four months observing and working in Bernard's laboratory and was one of the few contemporary authors to chronicle what went on there. He was later moved to write that his experiences in Bernard's lab had made him "prepared to see not only science, but even mankind, perish rather than have recourse to such means of saving it."​

Before you write off this man as an eccentric sadist, he is still renowned as 'one of the greatest of all men of science'. His vivisection methodology and subsequent estrangement from his wife is only a tragic footnote to his more acclaimed pursuit. As they say, science is built on personal sacrifices and strange losses. He might have lost a wife, nevertheless, found his life-force milieu intérieur in scientific doctrine.