My physics midterm didn't go terribly well. Ever heard that old adage: what goes around comes around? People love adages. Especially Americans. Especially Americans on the Internet. It's an easy alternative to coming up with an original thought. Anyway the point is that this adage could not be more relevant now, since my undoing on this test will doubtless be my failure to do the question about angular momentum at the end. Angular momentum - the only class at FIITJEE that I literally slept through - comes back to haunt me. It's a pity, because it really was an interesting problem, and solving it would have given me some vague sense of having triumphed over an old and hitherto unbeatable enemy. The incomparable N. M. was there herself, making it violently clear that the ambiguities in certain questions were not a mistake. As exams go I would say this falls in the same class as the ones that God had a predilection for putting people through in the Old Testament. (One is reminded of Job.) Then we remember that N. M. is herself something of a god, and are confused no longer. Hopefully others did badly, too, so that my grade won't be that bad. (Yeah, this is what education has been reduced to in the present age. How far we've come since the Hellenists.) Especially those gosh-awfully annoying Indian kids who get off on making public displays of their knowledge in class. A thousand bricks launched straight into their pudgy, smug, grinning faces wouldn't satisfy me. There's a lot I could say on the subject that I won't in the interest of keeping this entry free of expletives and sanguinary imagery.
I think old age is fascinating. It can be miserable, the debilities, the reduced mobility, and the dependence on others; but when you look past that there's something so... grand and dignified in having a large number attached to you. To say, for instance, that you're 90 is to say that you have survived for so long in the face of all the vicissitudes and uncertainties of life. If the world in its vastness appears cruel sometimes, then to live life so fully seems an heroic act of defiance - something almost John Galtian. Of course, you can be old as well as a huge dick (because sometimes the stupidities of your youth show through the benign aspect of old age), but I shall still admire you for being old. I made a timeline today, in which I drew out the lifespans of some of the people in my family (grandparents, parents' grandparents, etc.) who are deceased; and because I had space left over, I included random famous people at the bottom. To my knowledge my grandfather, who died last April at 89, is the longest-lived person in my family tree. After that is my great-grandmother (my mom's maternal grandmother) who died in 2002 at 88. Here is the chart. The brightness is kind of low, but the resolution is good enough to make out what is written in my drunken scrawl. (Not actually drunken, of course, but intoxicated with carbon dioxide and other things found in closed rooms.) Most of the names I have used on the left will, however, be unintelligible to anyone but me. The general trend from top to bottom is great-grandparents, grandparents, etc. If anyone has had relatives who have lived to be over 90, I shall be more than thrilled to know of them.
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