lines, points and my broken triangles.... . .

The sem at iit had just ended and i had gone back to my home-town Agartala during the month’s break. Its a small town just beside the borders shared by India with Bangladesh and my dad happens to be one of those few psychiatrist of this very small town. So, every evening me n my dad used to take off from our flat.. relatively in the countryside and on his way to his chamber he used drop me at the old kb lane from where my grandma’s home is like a 3 minutes’ walk. I used to go to my grandma’s home every evening to give my cousin geometry tuitions.....

And every evening i don’t know why this 3 minutes’ walk used to turn out to be sort of... special to me. In the midst of the cool winter breeze playing around and the darkness of the winter evening about to shade off... through this small stony lane as grandma’s home used to draw nearer.. it used to feel as if i am not just taking a three minutes walk into the future... but a years’ walk back into my past.... and all those childhood memories that me and geometry had shared used to come all back to me... and somehow someway i used to get lost again in a world of sprouting circles, concurrent lines.. complicated logics and an utter passion of problem solving....... . .

I was more of a back bencher and quite a hopeless kid with terribly screwed up acads back in those times... And even though i always had a passion for patterns but the only expression i had of it was to stare at the beautiful world outside my window beside my corner bench (might be my only fond memory of school). But as i got promoted (hardly) to the seventh standard we got introduced to geometry. I developed a very keen interest in school geometry. And soon what started out as time pass changed to a keen interest and then to a deep passion and finally to... a sick addiction. Being a kid i had many depressive stages of my childhood but during those tough times geometry never left me alone. It was my own secret window through which i used to enter into a world of my own.... I still remember those page full of constructions... that addictive frustration... the proofs of every single theorem that i used to do on my own... the beautiful problems that just kept growing harder and harder and yes.. more and more captivating.....

Soon it didn’t take long to master the school geometry till tenth. And halfway to seventh standard i entered into Olympiad geometry. It was incredibly beautiful. And even though my grades kept drowning into hopelessness and my parents kept on growing more and more mad at me.... but i had a whole new world to escape to... where no one could follow me.

And then there are so many interesting incidences that keep coming back to me. I had a teacher ‘Premtosh Sir’ and ounce while not being able to solve a problem i had to give up and show the problem to him. Being a maths prof at state university it didn’t take him much to solve it. I absolutely hated to give up in any problem n then to show them to teachers. After the problem was over i asked him....

“when ll my mind start coming up with such slick ideas like yours?? (comparing with a teacher is not right but i was a kid then.... and i was disgustingly frustrated... )

He laughed and patting his hand over my head said....

“he he... it ll.. don’t worry... it ll someday ”

Sir really inspired me a lot and he was friendly too... being in his late seventies he was like my own grandpa....

And then there was this problem.. the proof of the Gauss-Newton line( back then i neva knew the name... i only got to know it in the imo camp:D )... the fact that the midpoints of the three diagonals of a complete quadrilateral are collinear... it took me a year and a half to prove it... And yeah i never gave up... i still remember i came  out of Premtosh’s sir’s house completing one last manipulation that had stuck in the proof... and i called Subhendu Sir (my another maths teacher... in his early thirties.. he was more of a friend to me).. and i said...

“oh yeah... i have done it... Sir.. i have completed the proof!!!!!“  

i still feel the goose bumps i felt at that time... it was wonderful.. i felt i was invincible.. next day i gave the proof to him in a pinned three pages... guess my 1st paper... and i named it...

“The co-linearity of the mid points of the diagonals of a complete quadrilateral... by Chitrodeep”

Now that i think about it i feel like laughing my heart out... Yeah it was funny but it did mean a lot to me...

My journey with geometry had ended by the end of tenth... after i had cleared the national Olympiads and went to the imo camp... but then again... now when i look back i think its not the camp or the Olympiad certificates but its those endless nights.. that passion... that intensity that means a lot to me.. that no one can take away from me....

And as i grew older and entered into more modern sciences.. i realised that patterns are not only in the circles and triangles that i used to keep scribbling in my piece of paper but it felt as if they flew out and are there all around me... and now that i am just a minute away from my grand ma’s home... i can see the two sides of the road going toward each other but the best part is this that no matter how far they go... they ll never meet... a beautiful example of an asymptote...
or even the dynamics of the swarm of flies hovering around that street light... the fact that in order to keep getting maximum exposure to light they need to cooperate.. that there are constant phase differences within there oscillations back and forth the light hence giving a uniform distribution around the light.. and not a decreasing density from the light... its incredible how patterns stay hidden within the chaos...
or even the beautiful equation of the centenary that i derived still applies to the hanging rope beneath the  saree in that balcony... all of a sudden kb lane used to get a hell lot more beautiful than it really was... showing that patterns are not only there in geometry but they are there everywhere... in everything... in the ways we think... in the reasons we develop... in the world we see......

And every time i used to reach my grandma’s house... and run out of my three minutes i used to realise that doesn’t matter how hard i try... whatever i do... those days are not coming back. And even though Agt has given me very less reasons to look back at it but sometimes when i get lost in those unwanted walks to those dark shores of my childhood... i still see the washed out pieces of lines, points... and my broken triangles... and wow, they still amuse me....... . .