Zero and its variegated hues

Shankar Gopalkrishnan

DURING my schooldays, one sentence that teachers often repeated was: ‘If you write this answer, you will get a big zero!’ It set me thinking: Did zero always had 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 size? A modified form of the same warning was: ‘You will get a big anda!’ I felt like asking: ‘Ma’am, can you make up your mind? Is it going to be a zero or an egg?’ If there was a choice, the student would surely go for an egg. After all, you can eat an egg.

Imagination ran riot. I visualised the teacher carefully carrying trays of eggs along with the checked answer sheets. I saw students forming a queue and collecting the eggs as trophies, one for every zero in an exam. The bigger the fiasco, the bigger the egg you could carry home!

With negative marking in exams today, it is possible to get a score in the negative. Still, none of those scores can match the pride of place that a ‘big zero’ enjoys.

I wonder what made zero and an egg interchangeable. Maybe it is the shape. But Australians use the word ‘duck’ for zero. ‘So-and-so got out for a duck!’ Agreed, a duck lays eggs. But it does a lot more. It is stretching things a bit 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 ‘naught’ for zero. We are tied up in knots deciphering how ‘naught’ came to be used for zero. At times, ‘cipher’ is used for zero, borrowed from the Arabic word sifr. Americans go a step further. They interchange numbers and letters of the alphabet. ‘007’ in the US becomes ‘double o seven’ (o as in orange). The ‘101 highway’ in the US is called ‘one-o-one highway’. There are no half measures in America. Even if you make errors, you make them consistently.

Some Indian languages use the word shunya for zero. When you are at a railway station, you cannot miss the train numbers announced over the public address system, especially the zeroes in them. They stand out in the announcement: ‘Saat shunya shunya…shunya…’

A lesser-used Indian word for zero is pujyam. Literally, it means ‘worshipful’. How can zero be worshipful? Indian tradition says that there is no total zero; you need an observer who recognises the 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! What can beat this connotation?

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