This is the eighteenth 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! Scroll down for other articles in this series.
There are many stories about how the game of chess was
invented. About 40 years ago, a man told
his 5 year old son one such tale.
‘There was a king who
loved games. In his court there was a
man who was very good at inventing games.
One day the king ordered the inventor to design a game unlike anything
the world had ever known. The inventor,
after thinking about it for a while, came up with the game that is now known as
‘chess’, a game played by two people on a board of 64 squares with different
pieces that have different ways of moving.
The king was overjoyed. He was
ready to give anything to the inventor as payment.
‘“What do you want?” the king asked.
‘“ Just one grain of
rice for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, doubling the
amount of the previous square until all 64 squares are accounted for,” the
inventor said.
‘“That’s simple, ask
for something more!” the king insisted.
‘“No, that’s all.”’
The little boy was confused.
He asked his father why the inventor didn’t ask for something that was
more valuable.
‘The king found there wasn’t enough rice in his kingdom to
fulfill the inventor’s wish. So he cut
off his head for asking something the king could not deliver,’ the father
replied.
The little boy was too young to do the calculation. His father didn’t do the calculation for
him. Instead he took a bit of rice in
his palm, gave it to the boy and told him to count the grains. The boy found there were 376 grains. He couldn’t believe it.
His father said, ‘now if there wasn’t enough rice in the
entire kingdom to pay the inventor you can imagine how big the total number of
grains would have been, can’t you?’
The boy was astounded.
He couldn’t ‘imagine’ anything.
All he knew was that it had to be a really, really, really big
amount.
As the years went by the boy became more and more fascinated
with numbers. But one day someone said
something that made him realize that numbers don’t mean anything if you don’t
take into account what they represent.
It happened at the dinner table. His little daughter was still too small to
eat without spilling. She was having
rice. The little girl’s mother told a
story.
‘My grandfather was a farmer. When we were small we were not allowed to
spill any rice and we have to eat every grain that we served on to the
plate. He told us that every grain of
rice is made of 100 beads of his sweat.’ (See This country belongs to Pinchi Appuhamy)
In other words, there’s a lot of labor that goes in to
produce enough rice for even just one meal.
Multiply that by two or three meals a day, multiply that by the number
of people in the household and multiply that by the number of days, weeks and
months and you can imagine the amount of labor that people have had to spend to
make sure you don’t go to bed hungry.
Of course you can say ‘the rice was paid for so the labor
has been rewarded; what I do with what I purchase is my business’. Somewhere, somehow, someone would be
insulted. That’s not a good thing.
Numbers are amazing.
There’s so much in a grain of rice, this too is an amazing thing.
Other articles in this series
2 comments:
Loved this. When I was small besides eating every grain on the plate we had to pick up every grain on the floor as well-by hand. No broom!
Memories!
Beautiful article .That is why we should always close our eyes for a minute and make 'thanksgiving " to the labour who contributed , for making our plate of food a reality , before start eating .
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