Count My Chickens

Perhaps it will not be seen as a ploy to justify one's limitations, if I say that every mortal being suffers from some sort of phobia--some are of physical kind. Others sit deep into one's heart and works as a mental bloc to perform a certain work with natural ease. In both such cases, the reaction to a physical  task and /or cerebral challenge is disproportionate to the actual or imagined ferocity / rigidity of the existing provocation.Often the reasons for such seemingly  strange conduct elude even the person concerned, unless of course he /she is deep-pocketed enough to fathom out its cause through a series of paid visits to  a psychiatrist. Most of us are not that fortunate. We learn to live with it.

In my case I had an apparent dislike for mathematics since my school days. But it was a compulsory subject at the High School-level.So there was no way for me, along with quite a few of my hapless classmates, to ignore it altogether. Besides, the maths teacher, who I am indebted to for life, was a hard task master and very often my fear for maths got drowned under the trembling apprehension of his manual mode of imparting lessons. As a result, I managed to fly past my first public examinations with satisfactory results. My grade in maths was reasonably good, though not enviable by any standard. Now, my college education could start without the shackles (no disrespect for maths-lovers intended  though) of a subject like maths.!!

But such happy thoughts did not last long as I prepared for the Public Service Commission examinations after working as a teacher for a couple of years.The authorities appeared to be crazy to include mathematics (of high school level though) in the examination format as a compulsory paper. It was not that I could not understand how much time a monkey would take to savour bananas tucked at the top end of a greased bamboo, if it  clawed up at the rate of three feet per minute, and slips down by by two feet in next one minute. The problem with me was that    

I did not find interest in working out the sum to find a correct answer.Maths was the largest single hurdle between me and and my quest for finding a place in list of selected candidates for appointment in the State civil Service.

But as fate would like it to happen, all through my post-graduation days  I shared a room in a lodge with a post-graduate student of Mathematics. I used to observe his exploits, scribbling figures and symbols in rims of papers with satisfaction writ large on his face upon solving an unknown mystery.My immediate reaction to that was to echo a poetic borrowing from Oliver Goldsmith (in his poem, The Village Schoolmaster):

                              .... And still they gaz'd and still their wonder grew,

                                   That one small head could carry ,all he knew. ....

For that quality in him, I looked upon my friend in awe and probably with an amount of reverence.

My tryst with maths. in my early years at my workplace was rather embarrassing . To some extent it was of my own making. It so happened that once on my visit to Birgunj in Nepal, a few kilometers away  from the town where I was destined to find my better half, I purchased a calculator with the lowest price tag. In the late seventies, the take-home salary of the new recruits in the State Civil Service was not fat enough to spare about hundred rupees for a luxury item like calculator.But I was prompted to go in for an "expensive" article beyond my means, not so much to impress my newly-wed life partner, but out of my urge to find a permanent solution to the responsibility of going through the dreaded ritual of handling a mass of sundry figures written out by the Cashier in the cash book on daily basis. It might be recalled here that in those days there was no Bank account for the B.D.O.s. So one could hardly take a casual approach to the apparently simple job of summation required for that purpose. For me that was indeed a Herculean task awaiting  me  around the closing hours of the office everyday. A calculator would bring so much relief to my stressful hours in the office, I thought. Alas! I was proved wrong very soon.

I was ordered by higher authorities to take over additional charge of a neighbouring Block. The regular officer manning the post was to go on a long leave of absence. As a subsidiary input, it may be mentioned here that for want of any official bank account, a huge amount of cash, often running into lacs used to be retained, especially in Blocks in the drought-prone districts to meet the cost of running dozens of FFW (Food for Work) /RLEGP / NREP schemes,  in which wages to the beneficiaries were to be paid mostly in cash on daily basis. For the sake of security, there were embedded cash chests under double-lock at the local police station.

Accordingly, I went over to the local police station in the company of the Cashier and the out-going officer to verify the cash by counting the currency notes to my satisfaction as prelude to the change of guard for a few months. The embedded iron chest was located in the malkhana(store room for general comprehension, but more akin to the an attic in a western  home), strewn with confiscated items including  indigenous  arms of various descriptions gathering dust for years perhaps. Everybody was eager to see through the work of counting of lacs of currency notes. The Cashier,in his usual mode, started taking out the bundles of notes from the chest,. Counted those meticulously, noting down the denomination of each such bundle with amount thereof before keeping them on the partially cleaned floor.That was the moment  I had been waiting for when I could display my skill of counting, albeit with my newly- acquired device, yet to be a common sight in government offices in remote rural areas. I advised the Cashier that manual way of noting down the figures on a long sheet of paper before adding them up manually had become redundant in view of my new-acquired calculator. He could not but comply with my advice, apparently  with a lot of hesitation.  I happily keyed in the figures in  my calculator as the somewhat disgruntled Cashier counted the notes and repeated the figures for my benefit. It took us a couple of hours to complete the total exercise. I prepared them for being the chosen ones to witness a miracle. I pressed the button of my most friendly companion. It turned out a stunning total figure. It was too off the mark to be believed even by me. I could not but request the cashier to complete the recounting of the notes and adding up in a manual mode. We were running against the time as the daylight was falling fast, and load-shedding was not a matter of distant possibility in that area. However, the relieved officer was fortunate enough to finally   catch the last bus leaving that place for his onward journey on leave.

For me it was time to make a resolution on the spot to keep that cute little beauty in my shirt's pocket peeping out a little to underline its visionary worth while in office, but never to put the same on my desk to avoid repeating a calculated risk.