"Not much to correlate?" was the guarded reaction of my elder daughter Maneesha, when she heard the title. I responded that it is not all too difficult and will reason out once she was through with her semester exams. Had I continued, it would have possibly taken her attention off how cones and cylinders were to be sliced and looked at from different angles. I was aware of my daughter's aversion to such slicing and viewing much like me during my early engineering days! More importantly I ran the risk of getting admonished by high command for choosing an inappropriate time to initiate such topics for discussion.
A few days later, it was usual morning buzz at home and my daughter was getting ready for the college. Much of the workload associated with this early morning frenzy is borne by my wife - cooking, packing different kind of boxes for breakfast, lunch and snacks etc. My role in this electrifying sequence of events has been simple - to get my daughter dropped at the bus-stop before the college bus reaches there. Though simple, it involves precise execution of commands. When I hear "You may get down", I need to pick the beverage bottle, go down, take the car out and position it for departure. As soon as she rushes in, the next command would be "We can start". She would then be busy rushing an SMS to her friend who boards the bus couple of stops earlier to trace the current position. It would be a good idea if the college buses were fitted with a GPRS which could be queried! On this day, she got a response from her friend that the bus would reach in three minutes. Translated as a command, it meant that I had to employ all my driving, speeding, negotiating skills in the next 180 seconds. Within a few seconds, I had to slow down to pay respect to a huge speed-breaker and gain speed again. This had to be iterated couple of more times much to the anxiety of my daughter. At this point it was more like a tense one day cricket match - two balls to go four runs and two wickets in hand. After all the excitement we reached the stop 14 seconds before the bus arrived. As she started gulping down the milk, I enquired if she could figure out the correlation. She threw a puzzled glance at me and said, "Dad, we will catch up in the evening" and rushed towards the bus that had just arrived.
The opportunity finally arrived when we went for a drive on a week-end. Maneesha remembered that we had this pending discussion on Public Works and posed the question to me. Just then we arrived at a huge raise on the road aka speed-breaker and as always it needed utmost attention. Possibly like a crescendo? Not perhaps because a crescendo is supposed to be gradual! Just as we were getting down from this huge structure, I asked my daughters to name the second highest peak in the world. 'Godwin Austen' - pat came the reply from Reshma who was fresh from Social Sciences exam. The next .... before I could complete my question, came another one on the road - little more higher, little more longer. Phew, we could scale it up and down fairly smoothly. Kanchenjunga, the correct answer came in chorus by this time. I then started my explanation by stating that engineers in Public Works Department are well versed in Geography and that apart they are very passionate about India. PWD engineers need to be Civil & Mechanical Engineering professionals was the obvious retort that I got. I said that might have been true in the past, but not any longer and asked them to recall the two speed-breakers that we had just crossed. There was no need for that, as a third one came on our way, no less in magnitude than the earlier ones. 'This would equate to Nanga Parbat', I stated and paused to see the reaction. I could sense that the scepticism against my reasoning had started waning. The entrance exams for jobs in PWD seem to be focusing on mountains and highest peaks and when the candidates cross that hurdle to reach the interview, the interviewer kindles their patriotism and passion for India by emphasizing that most of the highest peaks are not in India. Before I could continue further, my daughters declared in unison that the results were there on the roads to see and by then Nanda Devi was sighted!
