What’s there in Mathematics?

How many of you out there have suffered unspeakable heart-wrenching humiliation for not being good in Maths? I guess quite a handful of you, indeed! Even those who have somehow managed to become engineers and doctors! Well, all of a sudden, this morning I felt like retaliating for the endless insults naïve children have suffered in school, at home, among so-called sharper friends for having arithmophobia!

Now I was quite good in Maths, but somehow, I suffered from a constant fear that if I fail to cross that 80% bar this year, I shall fall in the eyes of my parents, teachers and classmates. Not only that, today, in retrospection, have I felt that proficiency in Maths has a lot to do with your maleness too. If you are not good in Maths, you are not a man…you are a sissy. Alarming indeed and that too in a country where a Sankuntala Devi was born! I remember that my parents were always more bothered about my marks in Maths, notwithstanding the fact that I was scaling heights in the Humanities. I almost ruefully recall that I could not even happily pronounce high scores in, say, Geography, if the marks in Maths were not up to the expectation. I knew what would follow was an awful humiliation…intimidating anticipations about my future when I would surely be left jobless. Such terrible scolding often left me dejected for days, and spent midnight oil apprehending a beggar’s future. I had seriously started believing that everything, even your life and of course, death, totally depended on your potential of solving Maths problems. My belief was strengthened as the years passed, for I witnessed a huge population of children suffering under the auspices of not being able to make out what was the use of the information that the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle was greater in length than the two other sides.

Nobody bothers to teach children the philosophy of Maths; instead, they have attached with the subject a baggage of materialism: If you can’t be an expert in Maths, life will reject you forever! Isn’t that a criminal offence? I strongly think it is. Name one Maths teacher who can make you fall in love with Maths. Can you? Perhaps, no. For, most Maths teachers do not know how to relate those problems in the textbook with life. Now please do not take this at face value! Connecting Maths textbook problems with life doesn’t imply that knowing how to measure a line correctly can help you draw the plan of a house perfectly in the future. That’s useless knowledge! All of us do not turn into architects or goddamn civil engineers. I mean a more universal knowledge, knowledge of life! Surely, Maths can do that! But is that the way school textbooks teach the subject? Do they at all do anything rather than throwing many of us in the Darsheel Safary syndrome with its endless rubbish on numbers? Do these text books and for that matter the dolts that teach these books ever try to play with the magic of numbers and erase the fear from the little heads?

And to the parents: Do not feel at a loss when your child cannot score well in Maths. You know, that’s a good sign. At least, he or she would not degenerate into a machine. Celebrate if he or she excels in the Humanities…that would make them real human beings. I had deliberately given up on Maths in spite of a good score at the JEE. Instead I chose to study English Literature. Nothing catastrophic has happened to me, you see! I am quite successful in life, in my own little way, and thank God, calculations do not plague my peaceful slumber!