There was a young boy who loved to stare at the sky. Well, not all the time. He didn’t enjoy sky-gazing at midday on
cloudless days of course, but at other times he found it to be an interesting
pastime.
One day he saw a sunset unlike any he had seen before. There was red, orange and pink light playing
on the clouds. It was like some ancient
army getting ready for battle, with colorful armor plates and splendid
banners. He was thrilled. He wanted to
share the moment. He looked around and
saw a friend. He called out to the
friend and said ‘Look! It’s an amazing sunset!’
The friend looked. He
didn’t say anything. There was no change
in the expression on his face. The boy
asked, ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ The friend just said ‘Maybe I see beauty in other
things.’
‘Such as?’ the boy asked.
‘Mathematics,’ the friend replied.
It took the boy some time to understand what his friend
said. The boy liked numbers. He was amazed by patterns. He enjoyed solving mathematical puzzles. In fact thrilled as he was in solving the
Rubik’s Cube, he was far more amazed by the patterns he could create
thereafter. So he understood what his
friend was saying.
This is the truth about beauty. It’s all around us. In different forms. Some of us like sunrises and sunsets, some
find nothing more joyous that listening to birdsong. Some enjoy the beach, some like to listen to
the crash of waves on rock and some are happy enough to watch the receding wave
leave a line only for it to be erased by the next wave. There’s beauty in the smile of a child. There’s beauty in a tear drop. There's beauty in numbers. There are all kinds of beauty around us.
Bookshelves can be pretty.
You might not enjoy getting wet in a storm, but you might still find
beauty in the way the wind and rain blurs buildings and trees. There’s also beauty in ‘ugly’ things. When I say ‘ugly’ I mean things that we don’t
usually call ‘beautiful’. Like a
polythene bag. Ordinarily there’s
nothing remarkable in a polythene bag.
In fact, we sometimes see these bags crumpled up and sticking to the
corner of a drain. That’s not
pretty. But then again, we’ve all seen
the random polythene bag or sili-malla
being swept around and up by the wind.
It is as though they have been given life. Floating. Up towards the top of buildings,
dipping down towards a busy intersection, swept again towards the tree line far
away and then over a rooftop and out of sight.
‘That’s beautiful,’ the little boy might say. ‘Hmm…..not really,’ his friend might
say.
The friend might say, ‘I discover a lot of amazing things
when I calculate the digital root on number plates of cars.’
‘What’s a digital root?’
‘Let’s say you get a number like KE 1864. Add up the digits: 1+8+6+4.’
‘Ok. That’s 19.’
‘Add those digits too: 1+9. What do you get?’
‘Ten.’
‘Ten means 1+0; so add them up too.’
‘One’.
‘One is the digital root of the number 1864’.
‘So what’s amazing about that?’
‘Can’t you see? You
just drop the nines. Forget them and add
the remaining digits. For example, the
moment you see a “1” and an “8”, you forget those numbers. The same with 2 and 7. The same with 3 and 6. The same with 4 and
5. Each pair and up to 9. So in our original number we have to consider
only 6+4. We get 10. And it gets prettier. The money you see ‘1 & 9’ or ‘2 & 8’
or ‘3 and 7’ or ‘4 and 6’ or ‘5 an 5’, you can just consider it ‘1’. Then it’s easy to calculate the digital
root.’
‘I see,’ the little boy was getting interested in the game.
‘Give me a 4 digit number and I will tell you the digital
root immediately,’ the friend said.
‘Take the number of that car: 7621’
‘Seven,’ the friend said immediately.
‘How did you calculate so fast?’
‘Easy, I noticed that 6+2+1 is equal to 9. So I erased those three digits from my
mind. I am left with 7.’
‘Amazing!’ the little boy said.
‘Check this out.
Three 1’s make 3, three 2’s make 6, three 3’s make 9, three 4’s make 3
(12: 1+ 2: 3), three 5’s make 6, three 6’s make 9, three 7’s make 3, three 8’s
make 6 and three 9’s make 9. They are
all multiples of 3.’
The little boy realized suddenly that there are all kinds of
number games he could play just by looking at the license plate of a
vehicle.
His friend smiled and said ‘there’s so much beauty all
around us; maybe there’s mathematics in cloud formations and color combinations
in the sky.’
So they looked at the sky.
The colors were different. The ancient army was nowhere to be seen. The sun was sinking behind a building far
away.
‘A perfect half circle,’ the friend said.
They smiled.
This is the thirteenth article in a series I am writing for the JEANS section of 'The Nation'. The series is for children. Adults consider yourselves warned...you might re-discover a child within you!
Other articles in this series
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