Hate Triangle.

A triangle is perhaps the unsexiest shape on earth explained by the simple fact that it doesn’t have even one curve. So unlike circles, triangles are rather unattractive. (I am tempted to go a little obscene here but I am checking myself.)

I have always found triangles boring just like the love triangles of our beloved bollywood. But I started hating them once I started learning about them in my school. Now basically I hated mathematics. Numbers and their calculations I could handle pretty well. But the umpteen numbers of strange and weird shapes and their properties I couldn’t. And the worst of them all was the triangle.

A triangle is a closed plane figure having three sides and three angles. That much is simple. But it’s a lot more complicated than that, because if everything in life was that simple then anti-stress therapies would have been unheard of.

Sine, Cosine, Tangent and Theta. And squares and square roots. And 100s of formulae based on these. And Mr.Sujith, my mathematics teacher. Aspirin anyone? Mr.Sujith had the unrivaled ability to draw triangles in air and mark them and do calculations. And he expected us to copy it down from air to our notebooks and solve the problems he drew up in air. So in effect he was the problem creator in my class room, not me and my friends as everyone used to think.

Trigonometry was the reason I failed a test for the first time in my life. I still don’t know how I made it through the finals. (The guy who was sitting next to me might have an idea). So while Mr.Sujith went on with the whole atmosphere as his canvas and a group of students who looked like they hadn’t slept in years as an audience, I spent my time thinking about some rather beautiful circles.

Sujith explained for a zillionth time that sin is the ordinate of the endpoint of an arc of a unit circle centered at the origin of a Cartesian coordinate system, the arc being of length x and measured counterclockwise from the point (1, 0) if x is positive or clockwise if x is negative (now u see why I hated trigonometry) while I was clapping and jumping and exclaiming to keep myself awake.

I hate trigonometry and thus almost all the triangles. Almost. I still don’t know any thing about it and am still living normally. Except for the nightmares about the traumatic trigonometry classes.. Oh how I love the circle.