The Path To Utopia Is Not A Straight Line - The Premise
When asked this question at school, while studying geometry, we would all join in chorus and reply
"A straight line joining those two points!"
We would feel clever.
Until, one day, an arts teacher came and asked us the same question. We all laughed and gave the obvious answer.
"No!" said the teacher.
The class giggled a bit.
"But Sir, it is so. We learned in Maths!" somebody chipped in.
"But I dont think that is the case. Can any of you guess why?," said the art teacher, smiling.
"Perhaps, it is because you did not study math!," said the cheekiest kid!
The class was stunned. Everyone went quiet. They did not know what to expect for such insolence.
The teacher however, was not fazed. He smiled very calmly.
"Well, I have learned Math right into my university days," he said,"And I still believe the quickest path between two points is not always a straight line. I can prove it to you mathematically and logically."
And then he taught us a lesson we would never forget all our lives!
"OK! Lets start with two points. Can someone draw them please?" the teacher offered a chance for anyone. When no one jumped up, he invited the cheekiest kid.
The kid went up to the blackboard (it WAS a a blackboard in those days with white or coloured chalk). He marked two points A and B.
"Can someone mark the quickest path that you could take to go from A to B?" the teacher asked.
Before someone could come up the cheekiest kid drew a decent straight line between the two points.
"Good!" said the teacher, "That does look like the shortest path between the two points on the blackboard. Now, let us see if there is a situation when the straight line between the two points is NOT the quickest or feasible path between the two."
A few moments of silence and then you could almost hear all the brains creaking, trying to work this out.
"Got it!" one of the smartest kids in the class shot up his hand.
"Me too!" a girl's hand went up a second later.
"OK! You boy, go ahead," called the teacher.
"It would be a straight line if the blackboard were perfectly flat, which it is not. If the path does not lie on a perfectly flat surface, it would NOT be a straight line." said the boy.
"Good! Very good! Tell me where in life do you have a perfectly flat surface and how often would you travel in it? Often? Rarely?" the teacher led us.
A long 'Aaah!' went up as it sank in the minds of the rest of class.
The teacher then called out the girl who had raised her hand,"Looks like you have something to add. Go on!"
"If we are on the Earth, which is a sphere, the shortest path would be a curved arc. And that too only if the sphere were perfectly smooth and the Earth is NOT."
"Excellent!" said the teacher, continuing ,"So, do we all agree that in real life, the shortest path between two points is not a straight line?"
"Yes, Sir!!" the chorus went up. We all perked up. It was an interesting start to an art class. We all wondered what the teacher was trying to teach us that day.
"When you look out from the class window and look at the playground in the distance, where many of you would now prefer to be, what is the shortest path?" he asked.
We all worked it out - Out the classroom door which was in the opposite wall to the windows, turn left and walk a little bit to the staircases with its curved landings, two floors down, turn right, along the footpath next to the school front gardens, curving right around the parking lot and down the stepped terrace like seats in the pavillion at one end of the ground.... It was certainly not a straight line and the only reasonable, feasible path.
"Of course, one could try and fly directly in line of sight ('As the crow flies' as they say. But could we?" asked the teacher.
'No, because we cannot fly that straight, there is gravity.. We would fall.." came all the reasons, one after another.
"Good! Now lets begin the lesson I wanted to teach today," said the teacher,"In life, in society, not even in the world of math and physics, the shortest feasible path is always a straight line. We need to understand all the reasons why it is not. We need to take them into account and work out a path that is real and feasible.
Take for instance, a person who is a chain smoker and wants to quit. What is the quickest, ideal path? Is it always feasible? Can the person go about life as usual, only with the exception of not smoking starting from the moment he resolves to quit? The shortest ideal path would be less than a millisecond. Just resolve and move on with life.
Not likely to happen. Even if he has to meditate, substitute something for a while, it is not as if he has reached the final state straight away. There has to be a feasible, practical path taking into account various factors. This is the reality of life, of humans and society.
I want you all to write up an essay on this theme and submit it next week."
This lesson set me thinking. My essay on this theme is in the next part of my posting.\
Copyright (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2014
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