Devise a divisive device

I tend to look at mathematics as a device to divide first, and then do something else about it. Suppose…… (please try to create a very strong visual), suppose, we are just floating, drifting aimlessly, purposelessly, hopelessly, endlessly, or helplessly in that vast emptiness of space, far, far away from any galaxy, milky way or any source of light. We would be surrounded by utter darkness. We see nothing. We would be just a pure consciousness, just a pure joyousness, divine, pure awareness, and nothing else!

Here on this planet, we need to identify everything in its proper perspective, to support ourselves, to further our life, our kind, and propagation of all forms of life that support our kind. The identification starts with dividing. When we say, this is this, that is that, we are into the process of dividing things, separating it from others. Logic, when at its best, makes us at our best, to handle the material aspect of life. But when emotion divides us instead of uniting, trouble brews! We become attached to money, separating ourselves, dividing ourselves away from other ‘values’, we get heavily ‘grounded’. In India, there is (or better to say now, as “there was”) a tradition to apply a little moistened mud on the lips of a person whose life seems to be struggling to leave the body(when it is quite obvious that there is no scope to revive that person back to normal life). The belief is that we suggest to the departing soul “okay, your problem is that you are too heavily grounded, to leave this earth, so, here it is, take a little bit of the ground with you by tasting it for the last time”!

Oh! I am sorry. I apologise. I seem to have started off with too intense ideas. Let us come to normal senses. We need a ‘dividing-line’ between our likes, dislikes, sentiments, false-sentiments, addictions, weaknesses, etc on the one side, and the ‘need-of-the-situation’ (what is to be done practically, keeping aside those divisive forces from within, to deal with the situation effectively and successfully). Medical practitioners seem to be quite good at it at least while sitting on their ‘professional-chair’ within the ‘consulting-room’ (but try to shift their allotted window seat on a plane to that aisle, and they would re-act quite quixotically, forgetting that both the seats would take them to the same destination at the same time, perhaps a couple of seconds earlier, when in the aisle seat, since the window seated has to wait till the other makes way for him!). The good doctor just sifts the extraneous narratives, the painful details, to grasp the symptom accurately to arrive at the correct diagnosis. The busy Banker hurries to prompt the prospective borrower from the details of emotional woes due to financial turbulence, to get to the ‘net-worth’ of the borrower as early as possible, to be able to take up the next case. The ‘new-mother’ struggles to find the logical root cause of that abrupt outburst of intense crying of the baby child, by sifting through the deafening noise, peeping around the place where the child is lying. Now, if this mother gives way to her own sentimental affection, she would waste the precious time to put an end to the cause of the innocent child’s suffering. This is where the divisive device is needed to be devised, if no other experienced elderly lady is around. In business management classes, they put it simply “It is prudent to hire a squirrel, instead of training a horse to climb a tree!”. An intelligent entrepreneur needs to have a clarity to effortlessly divide the need-based-competence, cost effective outsourcing, while trying to manage the available resources and person(nel)-power (man-and-woman-power). There is a jocular or sarcastic way of putting it in Malayalam language, when they compare a cost-illiterate person, saying “Namboori enna theykyana poley” (Ironically, the most intelligent category of people are popularly the victims of traditional jokes. Before having a bath, there is a tradition to apply oil all over the body. They start with head. They pour out oil from the can into a cupped palm. It inadvertently exceeds the cubic capacity of the palm and drifts into the wrist heading towards the inner elbow, in a tiny stream. The abruptness of this spillage leaves no time to ponder. The sporadic act is to throw up the arm, over the head, to wipe the fore-arm on the middle of the top of the head, to salvage the spill-over. But the oil that is carefully cushioned in the cupped palm has not been fastened with a ‘seat-belt’, and it is left to have a free-fall to the rear! The bulk of the oil is lost! So the saying “Like that ‘X’ applies the oil to oneself”, when somebody thoughtlessly incurs huge loss to save some trifle wastage.

In the name of grooming a child into a brilliant performer at academics, the parent inadvertently creates an ‘emotional-divide’ between the child and self, which seems to grow and last the life-span. The intolerance that sprouts in the child, eventually drives the parent to an old-age home, to wait for the natural end, to conclusively deal with the ‘problem’. The mother-in-law fails to notice the ‘dividing’ line where her role as a mother has ended when the son now ‘heads’ a family of his own, and the wrong attachment for his well-being, the over-protectionism creates a virtual device that acts as a divisive force. I put it as mildly as possible, when I quiz the parents thus : “Is your affection / love for your children your strength or your weakness?”. I do not insist on a reply or answer. It is now up to them to devise a divisive device, that would help them to avoid a virtual ‘divide’ within the hitherto well-knit family.


(Tail-piece: Sometimes, we have to divide to rule! I, for instance, distanced myself from a popular example, which the reader would have been reminded of, and would have fitted well somewhere, when I quoted a ‘doctor’. I omitted it, to gain the reader’s liberal pat “Good, in fact there is another better example, perhaps it did not occur to this fellow…. A gynaecologist, in some complicated deliveries, asks routinely, though knowing too well the expected reply, ‘Only one can be saved, either the mother or the child. Now what do you choose’… that is the dividing-line-clarity!” )

Psn(6th June, 2010)