Fine Wining

When it comes to mathematics, the world is divided into those who love it and those who would rather beat their heads against a brick wall repeatedly than have anything to do with the subject. To the first lot, there is an analytical beauty to maths – a logical simplicity, a neat sequencing of numbers and patterns that’s rhythmic and unambiguous – a refreshing clarity not always associated with other subjects. To others, it’s a complicated mess, a jumble of arcane symbols and formulae with no grey areas or ‘it depends on the way you look at it’ to fall back upon, the sort of subject created solely to trip you up and make life difficult until you have the freedom to choose your subjects. While I’ve come to the conclusion that I belong to the latter category, it wasn’t always that way. In the beginning, when it was just arithmetic, I actually quite enjoyed the subject and was pretty good at it. While algebra threw me off a little bit, especially when matters turned quadratic and whatnot, I hung in there in a very respectable manner. Even when trigonometry, coordinate geometry and all that got thrown in the mix, things turned grim but I wasn’t completely stumped. Until…

Along came Calculus.

Calculus was a different beast altogether – a dizzying array of symbols, alphabets and equations that would stretch for pages on end for no discernible purpose. Things got raised to infinity, dragged back to zero, limits were imposed and all manner of strange characters started popping up everywhere. If the true character of a man is tested when he’s brought face to face with calculus, I was spineless, gutless and heartless. Apparently Isaac Newton had devised Calculus as a way of simplifying complex equations – if Calculus is the simplified version, I shudder to think what the complicated version may have been.

Of course, Newton was already a legend thanks to gravity. Calculus probably made him the greatest of all time, at least until Einstein came along I suppose. It was hailed as a branch of mathematics that had opened up a whole new world of possibilities. While I wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment, I didn’t see it as being a good thing. Calculus had made it possible for me to wake up in the dead of night in a state of cold terror. Calculus had made it possible for my worst nightmares to look as cheerful as a Kate Hudson chick flick. Calculus had made it possible for me to think that even dancing may be more my thing, even though I have all the grace of a refrigerator tumbling down a staircase. So you can understand why this was a world of possibilities that did not exactly leave me tingling with anticipation. At the end of the day, though I was still willing to accept that maybe Calculus did make solving mathematical equations easier. Perhaps these were equations that otherwise took a painstaking 2 days to solve and could now be solved in a frighteningly rapid 2 hours.

After my first brush with Calculus, though, I was wise enough to ensure that my life steered as far from Calculus as possible. While I did leave Calculus behind, complexity continued to follow me. No, it wasn’t in the form of higher studies or workplace challenges. Instead it was in the form of wine. The first time I encountered wine, my head was spinning. Sadly, it was due to the tasting notes on the wine bottle, instead of the alcohol itself. How on earth could an alcoholic beverage be so complicated? To me, the drink tasted a little sour and grape-y, but according to the tasting notes I should’ve gotten hints of blueberries, apple, cinnamon, cherry oak, cigar, avocadoes, muskmelon, ripe plums, dried ginger and dark chocolate. How could one drink taste of an entire tropical forest and more? What was I missing? Sure, I wasn’t much of a wine person, but did it have to be that complex?

It’s something we all try to do at a professional level, make things sound far more complicated than it actually is. But most people don’t generally fall for that. So when a designer unveils a new logo that looks exactly like the old logo but says that it is now more contemporary, optimistic and forward-looking because they’ve given an upward tilt to the angle of the stem in the F of the logo, you really know that all they’ve done is find a very expensive way to play spot the difference. Of course, bankers have been a lot more successful on this front. They’ve made their whole profession sound so complicated that they’ve been handed over large amounts of money by governments even after precipitating a terrible financial crisis, just because no one else could possibly understand what they did. But at least the socialists hate them.

On the other hand, people don't just accept the complexity of wine but even embrace it with the sophisticated, la-di-da air of detached eagerness. I thought it would be interesting to try a stunt like that with normal, everyday cooking. So the other day when the wife asked me what I thought of this rather delicious fish that she’d cooked, I seized the opportunity. Clearing my throat, I loftily announced that “The first bite had the truculent air of a student protest thanks to the mustard assaulting one’s senses, and then it mellowed down into a citrusy flourish drizzled with hints of pine nut, pink guava and mustachioed pistachio. The body of the fish had notes of gooseberry, cherry oak and walnuts that have seen better days. It ended with the aroma of drizzled honey and grizzled lemons and the aftertaste of a thousand splendid suns.”

Of course, I did no such thing because I did not want steaming hot gravy to be poured down my lap. Now, if only someone did that to the first wine snob, wine wouldn’t have turned into an alcohol you needed an advanced degree to appreciate. It’s alcohol – where’s the fun if you have to study it?