Sometimes it is silence and sometimes you can listen to a soulful music playing at a distance. I stand just at a door, waiting for my father to come. He has taken the scooter and gone to buy milk and stuff. It is almost bedtime and we are at a new place. I calculate he might take about ten more minutes to bring the necessities.

For now, I am alone. Completely by myself, with nothing much to do but wait. My books, my phone, everything is upstairs, where I will go once my father arrives.

For now, I am alone. Completely by myself.

The soulful music sounds again. I spread my ears and crane my neck to find its source. I do not see it, but get an idea that perhaps on the other side of the highway that extends along our building, there is some sort of wedding. Perhaps it is flute. Or it is keyboard. One thing is sure: it is beautiful, soul-stirring. It makes me nostalgic. It is the sort of thing that takes you so much back that everything you have seen, heard, learned, witnessed, experienced, lost, found, achieved – everything falls into one complete picture. Life is no more a shattered mirror. It is a complete photograph, and the music that is playing is the frame, for it binds the whole thing, makes it one like string does to beads.

I feel like standing here for the rest of my life. May my father take a bit more long and may I get to listen to more of this music! So soft, such a pleasure to listen to, such a blessing to hear … I wish it continues to play on for eternity. That it never should come to an end.

By this time, five minutes have passed and I painfully know this experience should come to a close. Now my father will arrive and now we will together head upstairs, now have our dinner, now recite our unique prayers and now go to sleep.

But until then, I have few more drops to enjoy of this music. As it grows slowly intense, yet retaining its inherent softness and soul-stirring-ness, I enjoy it even more. Music is like that: some points in music tickle you, and others are but orgasmic. They take you to another state, some other form of existence that only you alone can savor.

Wish I had a recorder with me!

Wish I had my mobile phone, and I could have recorded this. It would have been a miracle to be able to listen to this and achieve this state at any time I wanted.

But this is only partly true: miracles in labs are rare occurrences. By no means could I have recorded the atmosphere that is built around me. By no means whatever could I have recorded my solitude. It would have been like capturing just the audio of a cinematic movie, and listening to that sometime would have been a lot less enjoyable.

For now, I am alone and can enjoy this. My head starts dancing to the gentleness of the music and it instinctively faces up. The night is just perfect as well, I see. Clouds have surrounded the moon but are letting it sprinkle its balmy light onto the earth where music plays and I listen.

From a distance, I see some headlights, hear the sound of an engine. My father has arrived. He kills the engine once at the door, takes out the milk and stuff, and together we head upstairs. He is silent too, as if he has listened to some other music.

We all have our own music. But even then it takes us to the same realm.

My Mathematics tuition teacher is an excellent man. Not only does he encourage creative and extra-curricular thinking, but also when you present to him a doubt, he first himself understands it to the depth and then tries to find a multitude of examples to explain it away. Even when he has explained something, he keeps thinking about it for days to come, challenging his theory in various ways, searching for easier ways to explain.

So those days, we were doing Integrals. To be honest, I was getting slightly bored because I had been doing this for a long time. As you might have read in this article in Lockdown Mine, my exams had been postponed and I had got months of extra time, which was slightly painful because I had to go through everything once again now.

To combat the boredom, I began thinking of a problem I had got a glimpse of but vaguely remembered, from a YouTube video. There is this excellent Mathematics teacher from Australia, Eddie Woo, who also has a successful YouTube channel. The video I am talking about was this:

I will try to explain the problem in a simple manner. Say, you have got with you this shape of a boa constrictor eating an elephant:

With some knowledge of Integrals, you can find the exact area of this shape between the orange line and the x-axis. If the shape were a circle, the area would have been easier to find; were it an ellipse, it would have been almost as easy. With this kind of shapes, the process is a bit tricky, nevertheless it is possible. Enough talk to give an idea about what integration can do.

Coming to the problem I encountered, let’s take an example. Say you have this shape:

Suppose the area you have got to find is this mango-color region:

Say the equation of this weird-looking shape is w(x), w for weird. While sitting at the home of my tuition teacher, I tried finding the area of this shape through two different ways. Say the two end points of this shape are 0 and 17, and the two zeroes (a zero is a point where the curve cuts the x-axis) are, say, 8 and 11.

The first method I tried the find the area A using was this:

And the second method was:

Even if you do not understand this strange Newtonian language, and seem to get afraid by these overstretched S’es, you might have got the idea that in the first method, we are trying to put in the equation in some S-shaped machine and finding area in one go right from 0 to 17. In the second method, we are finding area by breaking the shape into three parts, because that seems more natural to do.

Surprisingly, the resultant answers that came from the two methods didn’t match. I was in a crisis: had I missed some important concept in my learning of integrals that I ought to know?

When I discussed my question with my teacher, he seemed to be confused too for a while. It seemed he had either never encountered such a problem, or that he had not at least seen it in a long while.

On the first day of our quest, he tried to explain it away, but he couldn’t verify which answer was correct and why both methods were showing different answers.

The next day when I went to him, he was ready with a notebook and a pen. He asked me, when I was finished with my curricular revision, to explain the problem once again in clear words and with clear diagrams.

The third day when I went to his house, I discovered a smiling face waiting for me already, eager to explain the solution finally. My teacher had done his homework!

He had discovered that in all such cases, one could find two sorts of areas: a Net signed area, and a Total area.

When you count the area lying in the negative y-axis, or below the x-axis, as something negative, something that cancels the positive, then what you are trying to find is the net signed area. A car started on its journey. The distance it is covering is a positive number. At some point in the journey, it is running out of gas, and the nearest gas station is behind it and not ahead. It takes a U-turn. Now the distance it travels is in the negative direction, if the end-thing you are trying to find is displacement of the car. If you are interested in the total distance travelled by the car, then there is no room for negatives. Negatives are non-existent, and distance in any direction is positive distance.

Similarly, if you want to see area under x-axis as something negative, you arrive at net-signed area. If any axis means nothing to you and all you are interested in is the shape and the area covered by it, then, my buddy, you are trying to find the Total Area.

That was the difference that had been perplexing me. It might have perplexed many scholars before my teacher and me, and some wise one must have come up with the two sweet terms.

My teacher remembered that he had studied the concept before but had never heard about the two terms.

Let’s take one easy example, neither a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, nor w(x). It’s a simple, gullible, smooth and baldly sine curve.

Between 0 and 2π, the Net Signed Area is zero, but Total area is 4 square units.

This was a wonderful discovery, that will go with me very far, and will work as an interesting riddle I’ll ask many people with utmost curiosity.

Without exception, everyone must have wondered one day or other, in one way or else, in secret or out loud to someone, that since currency (money) is made from paper, and since paper is nearly unlimited and renewable, and enough for all the human beings out there – then why on earth do all the governments not print enough money and solve the problem of poverty once and for all?

This question dawned upon me slightly late, but when it did, I was in a tremendous combination of discovery and crisis. It was as though I, a little kid, had ascertained the ultimate secret to ending all the problems in the world – be it poverty, malnutrition, health, corruption, or unemployment. I couldn’t wait to unveil my intuitive finding to the rest of the world.

That didn’t happen, alas. One of the things I have learned living here on earth is that ideas that occur to us are not always novel. Some ideas are really original: for example, the idea of making a plane in such and such way, that occurred to the Wright Brothers, might have been very original, or the idea of Theory of Relativity and the equation might have been really unique in every respect – but except for a few exceptions, most ideas are those that have already occurred to and have been considered already by fellow human beings. The idea of a Communist society must have occurred to many people before Marx, but he must have been the first one to be an influential writer in that regard.

Anyway, coming back to my story, this idea that had occurred to be was not, hence, “original”. It took some time to understand but I figured out that just printing more money wasn’t going to solve all the problems so easily.

If you haven’t already figured it out, this is what the explanation usually goes like: assume that governments really decide to do this, to print more money. Imagine this: all central banks print unlimited money and the government sends truckfuls of money to all cities and villages. Some money out of these garbage-truck-like trucks slips and falls on the roads, but people can’t care less since these trucks are distributing all this money to people as if money is water and has really started growing on trees. Let’s say governments have decided to 100x everyone’s money. Everyone alive is a millionaire, and all bank accounts have multi-digit balances.

What happens next? The initial guess is that now that all people have the required purchasing power, the problem of poverty should be solved in a matter of time. But that is not what happens.

To go further, we have to go to the fundamental concept: what is money? What is the purpose of money? Although four to five purposes of money are usually talked of, the basic purpose of money is to act as a medium of exchange or a store of value. This means that the number on the note is relative: it’s not absolute. It is always measured with respect to what is being exchanged.

Going back to our dream world, we find that since people are suddenly so rich, and everyone turns up to buy the thing, the supply falls short and suppliers in turn have to shoot up the price. The process is repeated many times and at last find that people eventually arrive at the position from where they began: now millionaires are considered poor, billionaires form the middle class, trillionaires are mildly rich and quadrillion-aires are those who are the ones to be rich. Things are just the same, with two little differences: one, that prices of all the commodities are also now 100x, and two, that all trees are gone.

So what is the secret, then, if not increasing the money supply? We return to the definition we early discussed: money is just a store of value, a medium of exchange. It is no value if independent.

The secret, I have figured out, at last, today in the morning, while dressing up, that the secret to ending poverty is to increase the supply of every commodity instead. We get oxygen for free – no one in the world is oxygen-poor, isn’t it? Why – because the supply of oxygen never falls short! It’s easily accessible, available to everyone, and almost unlimited with all the trees around.

Water was mostly free until recently, but even when it comes at a cost, it is very mild. Why – because water is also available in most of the parts where humans live, in abundance. When its supply starts falling short of its demand, some cost is tagged to it. The solution then will not be to give everyone money thinking it will solve the problem – but to somehow increase its supply.

If the supply of Gold were to shoot up today – say Elon Musk discovers a mine full of gold on Mars and brings all the gold back to earth – then gold would become abundant, easily accessible, and it will lose its value – more so because people will realize that it’s not too useful – a unit of banana will be more valuable than a brick of gold if you are not some extreme form of King Midas!

Therefore, the answer is not more money: the answer is more supply. Availability and accessibility, that is the answer.

The Secret is simple: Supply is the Secret!