Today is my dad’s birthday. February 13, 1916.
He would have turned one hundred years old.
He was born under the ‘Punartham’ nakshathram of the Vedic astrological calendar. This information had been recorded in his Bible along with similar particulars of all his family.
I don’t know what ‘Punartham’ people normally exhibit, but I do know that, to those who follow the zodiac signs, he was a quintessential Aquarius.
Papaji was singularly the most efficient person I knew.
Disciplined to a fault, and ‘meticulous’ to the core, I could write a memoir on him, and all what those terms encompassed for him, but on this milestone day, let me just tell you a single story.
The tale has to do with the Vernier Caliper and by extension, one Miss Meenakshi.
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I was a first year PDC student at the All Saints College in Thiruvananthapuram.
With great anticipation of a typical fourteen-year-old, I had registered for the so-called Second Group, with concentrations in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.
English and History were both available to me as ‘main’ subjects at All Saints. In another era and place, I might have studied those subjects and been the better for it, but one didn’t go near them with a ten-foot pole back then, especially if one was planning to go to, you guessed it, medical college. Didn’t everybody want to go to for Medicine or Engineering?
If not for this turn of life fate, I wouldn’t and shouldn’t have been in Miss Meenakshi’s Physics class. I had no business being there. I swear, When God was handing out Physics/Tech DNA, I was out in the popcorn line. 😢 I think God gave my share to my sister.
Now, Alexander Dumas’ Count Of Monte Christo, William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Charles Dickens and David Copperfield, Michaelangelo and the Italian Renaissance, Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, or clearly the best one, Ancient Indian History of Ashoka Chakravarti and the Maurya Sambrajyam, or the Rivers that flow through the Deccan Plateau, now you would be talking my language, and I could make a go of it.
To a lesser scope, Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution, the Krebs Cycle, and even properties of Ether, I could manage, but Newton’s Laws of Thermodynamics? Not so much, although I practice Newton’s Third Law to a T: ‘An Object At Rest Tends To Stay At Rest‘. 😁
And to make matters worse, I never could get bold enough to talk to Miss Meenakshi.
A cerebral (is there another kind? 😉), upper class Trivandrum Brahmin, who spoke English at home, and to whom Tamil was a second language, Miss Meenakshi was rather intimidating.
Cloistered and sheltered in a Central Travancore Syrian Christian setting, at Nicholson Syrian Girls’ School and most especially at home with my family, I tragically had no exposure to Anglo Indians, Trivandrum Menons (the elites of the day), members of the Chithira Thirunal royal family, and not even to Roman Catholics. And yet, nearly all of my classmates and teachers fell into one of these categories.
Stepping out of my comfort zone of that insular upbringing, for the first time in my life, I felt like an outsider. I was like a sardine out of sea water. I’m dead serious when I make that claim. Some of you may take me to task for using all these labels, but we clearly had those demarcations.
I was a Syrian Christian from Central Travancore.
To make it worse, I didn’t speak any English, and Miss Meenakshi didn’t speak any Malayalam. This made for an interesting learning experience – call it non-learning – from the get-go!
After moderate introductory lessons, she moved on to instructing us about the Vernier Caliper. Oh brother, talk about being confused, I couldn’t even figure out it was an instrument used for fine measurements.
I was mortified by my inability to grasp, and intimidated to ask questions, and was slowly inching towards failure: which would be not just embarrassing, plain downright not an option. So I opted to do what any lost little girl would do – I headed home. It was Pooja holidays. I couldn’t get out of town fast enough. And I was on the first Fast Passenger bus out of Palayam station.
What was at home? My Dad. I knew he would ‘fix’ the problem. He fixed everything.
A 1939 B.Sc. Mathematics graduate of the, then Science College and what is now known as the University College in Trivandrum, It’s fair to claim he’d know a thing or two about calipers.
Matriculation from college was rare enough in those days that every graduate, upon receiving the diploma, was awarded a presentation from the university chancellor who typically would be a British gentleman. Papaji’s was a copy of the Bhaghavad Gita, which is resting on my coffee table as we speak. Out of the few keepsakes I collected from my old family house in Kattanam before it went out of our possession, was this copy of the Hindu Scripture.
So back to the Vernier: I described to both my parents how I couldn’t understand a single word in the Physics class, couldn’t speak English, and I’m scared of miss Meenakshi, on and on and on, sobbing the whole thing out in one barrage.
Papaji moved right to the task at hand. Going over to his meticulously organised desk – clearly a skill, the genetic material for which, bypassed me 😜 – he found a piece of heavy cardboard, cut it out as a long rectangular bar, cut another smaller round portion that would slide inside or outside of the bigger piece I can’t recall, wrote numbers on both, big letters on one and smaller ones on the other, and made the contraption in such a way that the circular part would slide back and forth across the long rectangular section. And he proceeded to show me how I can measure big objects by the straight part, and miniature ones with the inside slice. After a few trials of going back and forth, eventually I got it.
It was never fun, nor easy, nevertheless, did I pull through, all because of one man, to whom education was next only to God: Education of all people, girls in particular, and without having to say it, most especially his kids.
He was a ‘Helicopter Parent’ six decades ago, long before that word came into vogue usage. In fact, he may have invented the term.
And as for the Tale Of Me and Miss Meenakshi, wherever Meenakshi teacher is on this earth, if she is, I wish her so much goodness from the fullness of a heart. For her part, she never gave up on me. May have disciplined me a few times. But never gave up. She herself was a newly minted M.Sc. graduate, and perhaps was just seven years older than me.
If she’s not on our planet, she’s surely with God.
By the way, Miss Meenakshi: not to blame you or anything, I still have trouble figuring out which button to push. 😁
February 13. Today. Happy Birthday, Papaji. Say Hello! to God for me.
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