Tuesday 27 July 2010

A Mathematical Twist to Relationships

A weird twist, isn't it? Maths gradually unfolds it's complexity to us from Kindergarten to Higher education and so do relationships, as they grow deeper by the years. Let us start with a basis to establish the similarity between the two and see how they proceed from basic level to calculus.

You enter a new class and there are so many students to interact with; as simple as counting Natural Numbers. After a month, some of them give negative vibes, some enter our positive books; hello to integers! Groups of like-minded people form just like sub-sets or Matrices. And then comes the quest for your crushes which marks the beginning of higher levels. You have your share of link-ups, 'Probabilities' of successfully wooing your heart-throb and not to mention the several cross-connections and on-off relationships happening within your class . And if you think that these 'Permutations and Combinations' are enough to make your heads spin, you are mistaken!

You are unsuspectingly dragged into an even crazier world. When you are friends with your crush, it is a simple 'a+b' situation. You start going around and in come the variables-ax+by, where x and y are likes of a and b respectively. But it is very simple to draw optimum solution at this point where there is a willingness from both a and b to 'çonstantly' showcase only the positives of their personalities and adjust the 'x and y's. When you get engaged, your negative aspects subtly start showing up in the form of 'cw+dz'...c and d being negative characters and w and z being dislikes. Still, they are simple enough to solve.

Marriage bombards you with endless polynomials, where the variables cropping up exhaust all the 26 alphabets, the symbols and the likes! It starts with where to settle, who cleans what blah blah blah...And so many angles from two families come into play that trigonometry blows out of proportion. The Linear Programming that was once resorted to in times of disagreements is utterly neglected.

Calculus ushers in, with the birth of your children where there is no 'Limit' for differences and 'Continuity' of bad habits within the family. Our behaviour affects their behaviour in a good/bad way; that is, an increment in 'x' brings about an increment in 'y'...Quite a 'Derivative' situation! And more the number of children we have, the more their behaviour is affected by us and their siblings...That brings in differential equations of first, second (and so on) order! We rack our brains to reach a solution for these uncontrollable series of differentials, just like Lagrange, Fourier and all did in their times.

Sometimes we let the equations run wild, sometimes we come up with a solution. And, this is how relationships throw us in a loop of derivatives and integration, forever!

Cheers!
Rati!

Monday 12 July 2010

THE PARADOX CALLED ''SUICIDE''

The rampant suicides, especially among the students these days, made me delve into their mentality and pen my thoughts on this dark topic. A wise man had once defined suicide as a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It certainly ''becomes'' permanent once the distressed resorts to the irreversible act. But what about the other temporary solutions that might have flitted across his/her mind?

No mental state can be as paradoxical as that of the one on the verge of doing the unthinkable. Taking one's life is the strongest resolve one could ever make. Just because he/she is not strong enough to face his hopeless situation, he becomes unbelievably strong to face his death...He loses the courage to withstand the worst but musters the courage to end his life. Due to the unbearable fear of consequences, he rids himself of the fear of mortality. To avoid crying over mishaps, he smiles in the face of death.

Why doesn't he choose the strength to cope with the stress, over the strength to deal with death? Why doesn't he divert his courage towards battling the worst? Why doesn't he overcome the fear of putting up with bad results? When the doer can't control his life any more, he takes the ultimate control over it! A psychological state full of ironies! A matter of choices...

I can't even figure out if it is planned consciously or done on the spur of the moment. The most intriguing and disturbing part about many cases is that the person was said to have looked absolutely happy and unruffled, moments before committing suicide. How can a seemingly normal person go beyond extreme abnormality within no time? Is it the overwhelming sinusoidal pattern of thoughts beneath the nonchalant exterior that coaxes him to end his thought process once and for all?

A suicidal situation is like a coin with two sides...You either ''head'' in the right direction or proceed towards the ''tail''-end of your life. And it is out of our bounds to comprehend the paranormal state in between.

Rati