Zero and its varied shades!

As school students, if there was one sentence that teachers repeated often, it was- “If you write this answer in the exam, you will get a “big jeero”! It set you thinking- does zero always have to be big, or was it possible to negotiate for a “small zero”? After all, zero is zero. What is the need to qualify it with a size? A modified form of the same statement was “You will get a big anda!” You felt like clarifying, “Ma’am, can you make up your mind? Is it going to be a zero or an egg?” If there was a possibility for exercising choice, surely, the student will vote for an egg.

After all, if it is an egg, you can eat it. Also, how big is the “big egg” going to be? You felt like asking, “Ma’am, this universe itself is sitting inside a huge egg called “brahmaanda”. Will it be as big as that?” However, it was unlikely, the teacher will tolerate such questions related to mythical cosmology.

Imagination ran riot. You imagined the teacher will carefully carry trays of eggs along with the corrected answer sheets after the exam. Students will fall in line and collect the eggs as trophy, for every zero in the paper. Also, bigger the blunder, bigger the egg you could carry home. After all, who wants to carry home a tiny pigeon egg? It is better to make the biggest blunder and carry home a huge dinosaur egg. Suddenly, the ignominy of scoring a zero was gone. You felt light and energized!

These eggs could be neatly stacked along with shiny cups and trophies at home. When guests came home, it would be a favorite conversation topic. Think about it- when you show off your trophies or your child’s awards to guests, they are in the least interested. At the most, they exclaim “wow” and move on.

But decades later, you could point to these eggs of various sizes and have a story for each of them, “I got this ostrich egg because I wrote- Each boy will get 16 mangoes when 4 mangoes had to be divided equally between 4 boys. That was in fifth grade. And this dinosaur egg- that was in seventh grade. On the world map, I had plotted Vasco da Gama’s journey- he started from Alaska, went around South America, and eventually landed on the West coast of Africa. I had mistaken the entire continent of Africa to be India, which resulted in a “phase-shift” in the oceanic path!”

It would generate so much mirth and laughter. Guests will soon roll on the ground, unable to control themselves, pleading with you to stop the zero tales forthwith! With negative marking in today’s papers, it is possible to get a score in the negative. Still, none of those scores can topple the pride of place that a “big zero” holds.

We wonder what made zero and an egg interchangeable. May be, it is the shape. But Australians use “duck” for zero. “So-and-so got out for a duck!” Agree, that a duck lays eggs. But it does a lot more too. It is stretching things too far, to travel from zero to an egg to a duck. We can’t take ducks for a ride, just because they are “sitting ducks” and cannot protest!

The English use “nought” for zero. Who is not familiar with James Bond and the “nought-nought-seven” secret service? We are tied up in knots, deciphering how “nought” came to be used for zero. While on this deciphering topic, why is “cipher” sometimes used for zero?

America goes one step further. They have fundamental problems- they interchange numbers and the letter of the alphabet. “007” in the US becomes “double o (o as in orange) 7” secret service. The “101 highway” in the US is pronounced as “one-o (o as in orange)-one highway”. There are no half measures in the US. Even if you make errors, make them consistently, so that even errors appear correct to everyone!

Indian languages use “shunya” for zero. When you sit at a railway station, you cannot miss the train numbers announced over the speakers, especially the zeroes in them. They stand out in the announcement- “saat shunya shunya…shunya…etc.”

A lesser-used Indian word for zero is “pujyam”. Literally, it means “worshipful”. How can zero be worshipful? Indian tradition says, “There is no total zero. You need an “observer”, who recognizes “zero”, the absence of something. That observer of zero, in every zero, is worshipful because he is ever present, in the recognition of even “zero”. Hence, pujyam!”

Who can beat this connotation to zero?