Idols of fact and fiction

(This was originally going to be a post about statistics, with pretty pictures; or something about Orwell, but I couldn't be arsed so I just started typing wildly. Perhaps next time).

When I was very young, ("about this high", as people often say), my grandmother would tell me stories from the Ramayan, the Mahabharat, and  about other figures from ancient Indian mythology. I ploughed through Rajagopalchari's translations of both in a couple of days. And I wanted to be Bhishma, who stalled the wrath of Parshuram himself, and Drona, who could defeat the greatest warriors and hold forth on the Vedas with equal ease, and the war-hungry Satyaki of the Vrishnis, who smashed Drona's bow a hundred and one times on the Kurukshetra battlefield. I wanted to be  Harishchandra, and Karna, men who would go to their death to uphold truth and generosity.

And then second and third standard came, and I wanted to be Squadron Leader Trevor Keelor, who shot down multiple Sabres in the miserably under-powered Gnat in the '65 war; and Arun Khetrapal of the Poona Horse who died in the equally barbarous and gentlemanly war where officers were awarded medals based on citations from the other side. And then I read Carl Sagan, and George Gamov, and the war machines gradually morphed into spaceships, and I wanted to be Rakesh Sharma, or Kalpana Chawla, fliers rising above the petty conflicts of this earth. 

And I read about how India had risen from the twin shackles of a backward society and a foreign ruler, and I wanted to be Peshwa Nana Saheb, the last of the Peshwas; Nehru, who went to Harrow, and Cambridge, and Naini Central prison, and who watched over India to the last while struggling to be liked by his people. 

I read about mathematics and science, and number theory and geometry and combinatorics, and I wanted to be Gauss, who wrote things in his notebooks that people would publish papers about after fifty years, and Newton, whose anonymous solution to the brachistochrone problem forced Bernoulli to say, "We know the lion by his claw", and Galois, the twenty-year old who furiously scribbled down what would become the basis of group theory the night before he would be killed in a duel over a woman. I was also busy reading poetry and fiction (for some reason Dickens is, or at least used to be the preferred vehicle of teaching schoolchildren English in the 90s). In the midst of adolescent confusion, I wanted to be John Keats, whose poems were actually readable, and Tennyson, whose verse was incredibly stirring for a clueless innocent boy in the seventh. 

And I read and devoured more fiction, and I was, at once the Scarlet Pimpernel and Athos the musketeer and  Etienne Gerard and Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes and Mowgli. And then came computers and BASIC and LOGO and green and black screens and keyboards that went clickety-click and Linux, and I was Alan Turing and Neo and Torvalds and Stallman. And more philosophy, and history, and I was Scipio Africanus, who vanquished the much more well-known Hannibal. And Marcus Aurelius, and Socrates, and Prince Andrei Bolkonski, and innumerable others.

I still don't know what I shall be when I grow up.