The one thing about exponentials that many of us would remember from school calculus is that they have the special property of remaining unaltered on differentiation: the derivative of e^x is also e^x. But we may not have fully absorbed the significance of this property for grasping the notion of exponential growth. I certainly hadn't, until very recently. So let's look at it this way. Consider first a quantity n which grows linearly with time. This means that the growth function is n(t) = n0 + at, where n0 is the value of n at t=0, and 'a' is the growth per unit time or the slope of the growth line. The first time derivative of this function is n'(t) = a. And the second time derivative is n''(t) = 0. So, using the analogy with physical motion, one can think of linear growth as having a constant speed (a) and zero acceleration. Sounds pretty unremarkable, right? Now let's think of exponential growth in the same way. Here the growth function is n(t)
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The word 'jamaat' in Urdu/Arabic simply means a gathering or congregation, similar to the Hindi 'sabha'. And it's not as if Hindi speakers ought to be unfamiliar with 'jamaat'. We frequently use the cognate 'jama', as in gathered/collected together. Yet, because we have chosen to neglect so much of our linguistic and cultural heritage, because we have somehow made Urdu a 'foreign' language, we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned by the media and public sphere around us into associating 'jamaat' only with certain organisations like the Jamaat-e-Islami, which in turn are associated in our minds with religious fundamentalism/extremism. And it is in this context that the Tablighi Jamaat, which has existed for nearly 100 years but which most non-Muslims (including me) had heard little about until last week, could be so rapidly fit by the media into a certain narrative, and painted, virtually overnight, as some kind of terrorist organ