Of Wheels, Grooves and Flanges

"A flange is an external or internal ridge, or rim.... flanged wheels are wheels with a flange on one side to keep the wheels from running off the rails" - Wiki

"A pulley may ... have a groove between two flanges around its circumference." - Wiki

A bit from the Stephen Jay Gould essay "Lucy on the Earth in Stasis":

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote in 'Locksley Hall, the most famous of all Victorian lines about the inevitability of change: " Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change!"... Tennyson himself later wrote that his striking, though peculiar metaphor for change (both visual and aural) rose from a misperception during his own first journey by rail: "When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830), I thought that the wheels ran in a groove. It was a black night and there was such a vast crowd round the train at the station that we could not see the wheels. Then I made this line."

Let me add: Although it wouldn't be much of a consolation to his spirit, Tennyson has never been - and never will be - short of company. Admittedly, there won't be many who think train wheels run in a groove like he did but another misconception, one that merely turns his on its head, is very widely held. Indeed, billions of train travelers (more precisely, the overwhelming majority of those who ever knew trains and cared to think of such matters) have thought and still think that a train's wheel is shaped like a pulley that grips the rail with its own groove (and that it is the rail that runs thru the grooves around the train's wheels). I myself, a keen train traveler for half a life, belonged in this group till just a few months back.

Since I got disabused of this howler of a notion(*) (I won't get into how it happened), I seldom miss a chance to ask people to draw the vertical section thru both the wheel-centers of a train wheel-and-axle set as it sits on a pair of rails'. To this day, only two among those I challenged did it okay without any prompting - Pop (he continues to stump me; and to really rub it in, he claims to have figured this thing out while at school!) and a lone college student from a batch of nearly 100.

On something else: Y'day (Feb 27th) night, I saw a big flash in the south-western sky and thought it was some routine fireworks display at some local fest. Today's papers have gone to town about a fireball that streaked across the sky around that very time and was seen pretty over a wide swathe of central Kerala. Many claimed to have heard a loud rumble and seen windows trembling. I just looked up the short note 'The false explosion of a Bolide' in my old copy of 'Physics for Entertainment'. Yakov Perelman's explanation of this strange supersonic phenomenon (written long before supersonic aircraft were made) perfectly fits the description of yesterday's celestial show as given by most eyewitnesses. Aside: I now have a sneaking doubt - whether the flash that I saw was just an 'amittu' going off!

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(*) it verily looks nothing less than a howler to me - for it is so obvious that if each train wheel had two flanges that together gripped the rail, the train simply can't move from one track to the other at a join.

Naseer, Ramanujan and V-Day

Was it not Heraclitus who said: "You cannot step twice into the same stream"? But I just read the same book for the first time, twice.

Naseer and Chakki

A few months ago, I discovered the Malayalam best-seller 'Kadine Chennu Thodumbol' (approx. 'To Touch the Forest..') by N A Naseer, wildlife photographer, activist and writer. A lyrical, visually rich and deeply felt evocation of the flora and fauna of Western Ghats, the book swept me along on a sensual journey that lasted a few uninterrupted hours and I put it down with the distinct feeling that in our mediocre and money-minded times and in this Kerala, so lacking in heroes, Naseer is one; at least that with his sheer commitment and the voluminous body of quality work he has built up over a career now well into its fourth decade, he gets quite close to being one.

Last week, I saw the man give a lecture cum slide-show. It was quite pleasing to note that Naseer is at least as good a lecturer as he is a photographer - he spoke confidently, with a crisp command over facts, an understated touch of humour and an easy, friendly connect with the audience.

Among the dozens of superb pictures he showed us were a few of the Malamuzhakki or great hornbill, the same species as Ammu/Chakki, our National Games mascot (the last post here was about her name). I was struck by the bird’s impressive looks and superb colors(white, black and yellow); and it looks even more stunning when in full flight. It was then that I realized I had never read the Wiki article on hornbills. Right after the talk, I went there, saw more stunning pictures and learnt the word casque (as in ‘…. Of Amontillado’) could also stand for the mysterious helmet like structure on the hornbill’s head(*).

Aside: Naseer also showed the closeup of a hooded cobra, fangs bared, and remarked: “what a smile!” and that reminded me of a laughing snake I saw a few weeks ago – and wrote about.

I got back from the talk and picked up Naseer’s book again. Casually leafing thru it, I saw some hornbill pictures and noted with considerable surprise that I had just seen these very pictures at the talk and had felt I was seeing them for the first time. And things began to get really unsettling when I saw and reread an article on the Malamuzhakki in the book; everything felt frighteningly fresh – whatever read but a few months back when I cover-to-covered the book with great relish had simply vaporized from memory (so much so that while writing the last post here ‘Chakki’, I had never thought of dipping into Naseer’s book for details - that Naseer had at all written at some length about the hornbill had gotten lost)!

On Metaphors:

After that worrisome note on memory loss, let me make an attempt to get back to form:

The flowers of the murikku tree or erythrinia are a striking red. The other day, I heard an old Malayalam song by P.Bhaskaran: a child sees the murikku and the fallen flowers strewn around it and asks. "Murikke! Who is the one that chewed paan all night and has spat all around around you?!"

I found the metaphor therein quite irksome: Is it not too much of poetic license to liken paan spit with fallen flowers (or the other way round)? But then, my Old Man said: "You simply haven't observed the scattered petals of fallen murikku flowers. They look just like pan-spittle. And a metaphor needs only to be true to the attributes it is based on, conventions of ritual purity and stuff are immaterial!"

That made me recall an old story about Vedanta master Ramanujacharya. An online version goes:

Ramanuja studied under Yadavacarya, a renowned Sankarite scholar. One day the guru was explaining to Ramanuja a sutra "tasya yatha kapyasam pundarikamevamaksini" (Chandogya Upanishad1.6.7), saying that according to Advaita Master Sankara, the two eyes of Purusha (the supreme personal absolute) are like two lotuses which are red like the backside of a monkey (from ‘kapi’, meaning monkey). On hearing this interpretation with the unbecoming and low metaphor, Ramanuja's soft heart melted and tears rolled down. He explained to his guru that it is a sin to compare with the posterior of a monkey the eyes of the Supreme Personality of Godhead - who is endowed with all gracious qualities and who is the repository of all the beauty of the universe. Yadava challenged the boy to explain the verse if he could. Ramanuja analysed the word kapyasam to mean `blossomed by the sun' and the verse to mean "The eyes of that Golden Purusa are as lovely as lotuses blossomed by the rays of the sun." …

After a few more such incidents when Ramanuja corrected his guru, Yadavacarya thought him to be a threat to the Sankarite tradition and plotted to kill him. Later it came to pass that Yadavacarya was to become the disciple of Ramanuja.

As one can argue based on the murikku metaphor, Ramanujan's revulsion towards Sankara's analysis of 'kapyasam pundareekaksham' is misplaced (at any rate, for a true Vedantin, there is no distinction between the ethereal and the base). Nevertheless, one can still seriously question Sankara’s interpretation by appealing to poetics proper: The eye-lotus parallel (so common all over Indian literature) is based on shape as the key attribute - when the Upanishad likens the eyes of Purusha to a lotus, it implies his eye has the pleasing form of a lotus petal; the other attributes that the objects being likened may or may not possess do not matter. That the lotus does have a color very similar to the nates of many monkeys (**) is a valid fact but it refers to an attribute irrelevant to the metaphor likening the eye and lotus; ergo, Sankara's analysis is flawed.

Aside: Arundhati Roy quotes a somewhat dirty Mal song in 'Small Things' that puts forward a Just-so type of explanation for the color of the monkey's backside.

A V-day:

A Valentine's Day just went by. I received a curious message with this piece of advice: "Put on that old 'kaavi' shirt of yours and walk up and down the Marine Drive Walkway; who knows, you may land a rose!".

The said shirt used to be a bright orange when I bought it a decade ago as a step towards building a collection of plain unicolor shirts. Now, it has not only faded to a dull kaavi (the color associated with monasticism in India) but received damages from a botched 'istri' effort. Whatever, I acted as per the advice and once the walk got done, went across the street to my favorite watering hole.

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(*) The artist who created Ammu has splashed her with inappropriately gaudy colors – an orange casque and violet beak.

(**)I learnt the word 'nates' while researching this piece; many devotees have put up pages on this story and quite a few were too squeamish to say ‘backside’ or even ‘posterior’ and chose 'nates'