Letter From Lahore - August 9, 2002

After the initial shock of receiving a summons from the National Accountability Bureau, the actual event, which was a conference in Islamabad, was a pleasant surprise. It is heady enough being feted and asked to contemplate the future of the nation, this time the hosts were in uniform. One young lieutenant, who looked like an old pupil and was very nice, turned out, on closer inspection, to be a Lieutenant-General! Then two more!

If you have never been addressed as sir‚ by men with crossed swords on their shoulders, you have missed out on one of the pleasures of life.

Perhaps, the nicest part was that most of them seemed to be clever young men with their heads screwed on right. They think clear, talk sense and mean business. And their chief, General Musharraf, has a manner and body language which is easy and confident, and the air of a man who knows where he's at. It is a good and hopeful sign, and if it is giving some ancient political types sleepless nights and butterflies in the stomach, it is no skin off my nose.

Meanwhile, to keep ourselves amused, we have an old trick, we start rumours. The latest is a bit of a lark! For the past weeks, word has been going round that a new ordinance is in the offing which stipulates that henceforth - wait for it - that a month will consist of 36 days! Every day there is a flurry of calls - always on the mobile phone which cannot be traced - with friends checking if there is anything further on the rumour.

Because it makes a peculiar kind of sense, see. In these times of accountability and thrift, some petty bureaucrat could easily make a name and come up with the bright idea to pay people 30 days worth of salary for 36 days of work. And the number 36 makes sense also because it can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, and 18. There are still people around who haven't forgiven mankind for the decimal system based on 10.

They insist that the number system should have the base 12 which is divisible by more numbers. They have had their comeuppance in the binary system of the computer world which isn't divisible by anything! Division, and maths in general, make trouble for lots of people you see.

The ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle, any circle, is a fixed number called by the Greek letter ?, and it is an endless decimal beginning 3.1415..! It is a peculiar number, but extremely useful in maths. In at least one State of the US, it is probably Nebraska, some people must have been really miffed because they passed an actual State Law, still on the books, that in their State ? would be 3! And forget maths!

In fact, I am inspired by the whole caboodle, and am contemplating starting my own neat little rumour. Not only are they about to declare a 36-day month, but, to go with it, they are also going to impose a 360-day year! Imagine how we could thumb our noses at the Bank and the IMF if we only had to pay ten monthly salaries a year.

This year thing is a bit of a mess anyway and could do with a bit of fiddling. There are all these silly months with different numbers of days. And all because of that pair of megalomaniacs Julius and Augustus Caesar. We were happy enough with ten months, with the last called December, or tenth. And they had to put in two more named after each of them, July and August.

And then they had to borrow extra days to make their months 31 days long each, which left February with a miserly 28.

Actually that was not all bad, because as a friend once pointed out, "It is a good thing Augustus decided to name one month after himself. Just imagine we could have been stuck with the sequence May, Juna, July, Amitabh Bachchan, September...!" Ridiculous!