Mathematics Hothouse

Enid Blyton has recently been accused of sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and lack of literary merit. Well! After 70 years, an organization called English Heritage chooses to reappraise her works through the filter of the current value system. Not my circus, not my monkeys, except that I grew up loving her books in faraway India, and feel impelled to speak up.

Even if some of this harsh criticism were deserved, I would say her characters simply reflected the mores of those times, or at least what most ordinary people of that time might have agreed with. As someone who has read her books over and over as a child, and later as a mom, here’s my take.

Sexism: That Georgina of Famous Five wanted to be George was not hard to understand. Growing up with brothers who had more freedom, I could see the advantages of being a boy too!…

I got my second vaccine dose yesterday. I’m done for now, but who knows how the final vaccination schedule will pan out, with newer strains, or variants of concern as they are called, still proliferating. These vaccinations could turn out to be an annual ritual. I’ve stopped questioning. What’s the point anyway?

A genuine accident, an act of carelessness, supreme recklessness, a deliberate plan, whatever it was, it has changed everything. I’m talking about the origin of the almighty Virus, of course. Our individual worlds are now tiny spaces in which the same activities repeat day after day, especially during the weeks of lockdown.

For some, it is getting the body battle-ready for COVID – drinking brews made from ginger, turmeric or pepper, squeezing lemon juice on everything that’s served, three different types of exercise regimens scheduled at intervals through the day . . .

For some, it is cleaning…

Let’s start with a joke:

A physicist, a biologist and a mathematician are sitting in a street café one morning watching an empty store on the other side of the street.They see someone unlock the store and go in.Time passes.Someone else goes in. More time passes. Then three people come out.

The physicist says, “Our measurements weren’t accurate.” The biologist says, “The two people who went in must have reproduced.” The mathematician says, “If one more person enters the store, it will be empty.”

Of course the joke here is that the mathematician is holding the absurd belief that there are a negative number of people in the store.¹ The joke is built on our shared knowledge that although negative numbers make sense in some contexts, they aren’t sensible in the present context. But the knowledge that negative numbers do make sense in some contexts shouldn’t be taken for…