Solving for P

Learning Objective: to understand the value of P in an equation employing multiple unknowns.

Part 1: Word problem Location: Near the Detroit of India

A German is a person from Western Europe. This particular German is a college professor in his 50s. His gray hair is parted down the middle. He has pale green eyes. He wears a fanny pack and has purchased a padded seat for his bicycle. He uses the imperative even when asking questions. He speaks English with an accent.

I take my bike to a boy who doesn't speak to me, only takes the bike out of my hand, snakes the hose over to the tire, rotates the cock to the side, fills the tire, squeezing it as he goes, then holds up two fingers. His shop is run by three adult men who smoke in the shade of a white tarpaulin. They sit beneath a tree in the back of the main shopping center. There are rows of bikes idling under the tarp, all of them the sort that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath tootled around Oxbridge on in their black robes nearly 50 years ago. Giant, blond, fair crows on bikes.

The boy takes the coin from me (the ones and twos are indistinguishable). I don't see what he does with it. I don't care.

The German man says, "You must haggle with them. You must not seem like a stupid tourist." I pace beside him, my rickety bike with its one flat tire rattling over the pavement.

"They should not," he continues, rolling his bike along blithely, "they should not be allowed to take advantage. Or they always will. It is not dignified. You should say something."

I scrunch up my mouth and look into his pale face. I make him feel better by nodding at him in Euro-American white solidarity.

Example 1.1: Conversions

Rs 2 is the price I pay to have a 12-year-old Bengali boy put air in my bicycle tire.

Rs 1 is the price the German man pays when he needs air, at another air station near the fruit vendors. He tells me this when he takes me, on the bicycle, to where the fruit vendors congregate.

Rs 1 is $0.02.

$0.75 is the price of air in America.

$150,000 is my family's gross annual income (GAI), in American dollars.

Practice with conversions: Calculate Rs 1 as a percent of my family's gross annual income.

First:

1. 1. Convert GAI to Rs:

   1. a. Convert dollars to cents:
      100 × $150,000 =
      15,000,000 cents

   2. b. Convert Rs 1 to US cents
      (9/2010): Rs 1 = 2 US cents

      A:  15,000,000 ÷ 2 =
      Rs 7,500,000

Then:

1. 2. Solve for percent of GAI:

   1. a. x/100 =100/7,500,000

   2. b. 100 = 7,500,000x

   3. c. 100/7,500,000 = x

   4. d. 0.000013 = x

      A:  Rs 1 = 0.000013% GAI

Solution:

Rs 1 = 0.000013% GAI

Statement: The one rupee extra I spend represents my two cents, which is approximately one thirteen-hundred-thousandth percent of my family's gross annual income (GAI). When I fill my tire every other day for the eight weeks I'm in India, I have overspent by Rs 28 ($0.56), or by about thirty-six-hundred-thousandth percent of my family's GAI.

A soft tool for American diplomacy is a person deployed to foreign countries to introduce their citizens to "average" Americans. Many Fulbright-sponsored lecturers are white, urban, progressive university professors in their 40s, 50s, or 60s. Some own Birkenstocks. This particular tool is a white, middle-aged professor from a regional university near Atlanta. She has situational bronchitis and usually wears fuzzy blue slippers.

Terms of Equation

Figure 1.

Inequalities

P is (post)colonial power, whose raw value is white, male, prosperous, Euro-American

p is power of the (post)colonized

f is gender female

b is skin color

t is state of dentition

a is physical decrepitude

d is poverty and dereliction as evinced by...