Quantum leap to qualitative plane

“Swalpa adjust madi, sir” (adjust a little, please) is commonly heard in Bengaluru, especially if you are travelling in a crowded bus and lucky enough to be sitting down; you will most likely hear it from a passenger standing next to your seat. And you oblige. Well, I wasn’t lucky to have allowed his generous bottom to wedge me out of my little corner. His idea of “little” was different from mine. “Little” often has a way of being different for different people.

Coffee with a little sugar assumes different dimensions from one end of India to the other or even from Basavanagudi to Banasawadi within Bengaluru. R K Narayan was annoyed when asked, “Want your coffee, black or white?” He only knew one coffee, Kumbakonam-degree coffee, that his mother made back in Tanjore, and everything was just right.

My mother thought she was beyond reproach. If I complained about too little salt or too much spice, she would nudge me with the ladle without the other ten people bending over their meagre food plates knowing.

To my great comfort, the numbers remain the same for everyone and everywhere, whether in Basavanagudi or Banaswadi.

One early morning in a hotel in Trondheim, in northern Norway, when the night was zero and lonely, I had nothing to do. So I picked up a casual conversation with the young girl at the reception desk and asked her: “The hotel is almost empty; what is the occupancy?” She was alarmed. “Why do you ask?” I assured her with a benign smile that it was a casual question. She relaxed and said, “Give me a minute. It was 17.4 per cent last week and 43.1 per cent the week before.”

I was stunned—not by the figures, not that I remember them correctly, but by her precise answer to a seemingly non-consequential question from a perfect stranger. I contemplated this and came to the conclusion that such precision is possible only for minds that have been nurtured with care by teachers and parents. There is nothing casual about them.

While I was pondering on this, my eight-year-old grandson Ganesh breezed in and said, “Why don’t you play with me a little, thatha? You are always crouching over books.”

I wondered what he meant by “a little” and, more importantly, “always,” which is the impossible 100 per cent. Are we on the same wavelength? Does he need some induction? Is he old enough to move from the qualitative plane to the quantitative?