Queens who were Spiritual Preceptors of their spouses

In "Yoga Vasista", a canonical text ascribed to Valmiki & longer than even his  Ramayana, occurs the story of Queen Chudala. Incidentally, this is the text which impressed Dara Shikoh, the elder brother of Aurangazeb, so much that he got it translated into Persian. Chudala was the princess of Saurashtra, & married King Shikadhvaja of Malava. After ruling happily for many years, the couple hankered after spiritual knowledge. However, in their spiritual journey, Queen Chudala made faster progress than her husband the King. Then after many incidents, she succeeded in making her husband also attain their common goal.

St. Margaret of Scotland (1045-1093) was an English princess & Scottish queen. She married King Malcolm of Scotland in 1070. Malcolm was not, like Shikadhvaja above, a naturally spiritual man. She civilised him by reading the Bible to him. She instigated religious reform. She served the orphans & the poor everyday before she ate. She rose at midnight every night to attend the liturgy (public ritual worship). She established a monastery. She used a cave as a place of devotion & prayer, now named after her. She spent much time in prayer, devotional reading & ecclesiastical embroidery. Her husband so adored her piety that he had her books decorated in gold & silver.

She was canonised in 1250.

Education & Work for Life

In most Western countries, in addition to the subjects normally taught elsewhere, learning a language of a foreign country, learning to play a musical instrument & active participation in a sport are mandatory in School stage, without which higher education in College is inaccessible. This obviously results in a well rounded human being, which is the purpose of education. It is assumed that the students retain their interest in these co-curricular activities throughout their life, irrespective of their chosen profession, becoming in the process, well-informed citizens.

A corollary of the above system of education is the 8 hour working day. Though it was in vogue in 16th Century Spain, it was Robert Owen, a visionary  Welsh textile mill owner, who tried to universalise it in the early 19th Century. His idea was that each day should be divided into 3 equal parts for work, sleep & recreation for human workers.

Sadly in this 21st Century, ignorant politicians & industry leaders are talking glibly about 14-16 hour working days. They may be unaware of Tolstoy's story "How much land does a man need" where a greedy man worked himself to death to get more land. Also George Bernard Shaw writes in his "Intelligent Woman's Guide" that slaves were worked so that they expired after 7 years. The reason being that if they died soon after purchase, the owner would lose his investment. And if they lived longer than 7 years, they would not be as productive as a new slave!

Another lobby argues the 8 hour day limit was for manual labour & does not apply for white collar jobs. This is patently untrue as mental labour is more exhausting than physical labour. Creative writing of Code, which employs many educated  people now, is intensely exhausting. Medical professionals work in a highly stressed "life or death" situations. If they are over-worked, their mistakes may be fatal.

Noted thinker Bertrand Russel & Designer William Morris (both highly productive men!) also held similar views. To return to work only after a minimum of 16 hours off each day, should be enshrined as a Human Right under the Constitution. To conclude, it should be remembered that one works to live & not live to work!

Teacher - Student regard in Detective Fiction

Poison in the Pen (1957) by Patricia Wentworth featuring her detective Miss Maud Silver is a novel about anonymous letters. This subject was also the backdrop of Agatha Christie's "The Moving Finger" (1942), a Miss Jane Marple Mystery. However, many critics feel that the later book is the better one. Be that as it may, Miss Silver, when she arrives at the ill-fated  village, meets her old student Randal March, who has become Chief Constable. When he was a small boy, he was delicate & so was educated along with his sisters by Miss Silver, then their governess. However a couple of years of her tutelage put him right. Later after retiring from teaching & becoming a private detective, their paths continued to cross, increasing his regard for her.

Dead Water (1964) by Ngaio Marsh deals with an elderly lady Emily Pride inheriting a place containing a water spring, with allegedly healing powers, a la Lourdes. She is against the commercial exploitation & runs against vested interests out to make a quick buck. When things start getting ugly, she informs her former beloved student, now Inspector Alleyn of Scotland Yard. Such is his regard for his former French teacher, that he rearranges his hectic schedule to attend to her.

Human ear & Mathematics

The musical octave is universally divided into twelve semitones. As the frequency doubles in each octave, the semitones form a geometric progression with the common ratio being the twelfth root of two or approximately 1.06. (In a geometric  progression, each number is multiplied by a common ratio to get the next number in the progression.)

M. Pietsch & others in their paper "Spiral forms of the human Cochlea", write "Inner ear geometry is compared to shells of mollusks. Due to the apparent similarity to the Cochlea, the Nautilus shell has become a symbol of hearing. The Nautilus shell is a perfect example of a logarithmic Fibonacci spiral." (A logarithm is the exponent to which the base number should be raised to yield a given number. A Fibonacci sequence is one, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones.)

Samuel Arbesman writes in his "Fractal Musical rhythms" that "White"noise is the static we hear between radio stations. The other extreme is "Brown" music, which is simply a random walk up & down the musical scale. In between is 1/f noise, called the "Pink" noise. Most music that we listen to is 1/f noise. It has the right combination of pattern & unexpectedness, & is pleasing to the human ear. The shape of the curve described by 1/f music, has a fractal shape!

(Euclidian Geometry deals with straight lines. Analytic Geometry deals with curves. Fractal Geometry deals with irregular surfaces.)