Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, may be arriving on his first State visit to India but the French have been embedded in India and Indians' daily life for a pretty long time.Louis Pasteur may be known to a few million Indians and unknown to many, but pasteurised butter and pasteurised milk are consumed on a daily basis by hundreds of millions of Indians. Pasteurisation, in a nutshell, involves heating milk to a very high degree of temperature for a few seconds and then cooling it rapidly, to kill pathogens.India's self-sufficiency and surplus in milk and milk products owes much of its success to this process that allowed milk to be preserved for longer periods of time.
The humble pencil, our writing instrument of choice as students and a reason for much heartburn if someone borrowed it at school, came from the land of Macron. The modern day pencil, which has graphite mixed with clay, was an invention of French army officer, Nicolas-Jacques Cont, in the 18th century.
Now that you have a pencil, a sharpener can't be too far behind. Yes, the pencil sharpener is also, by ethnicity, Franaise. In fact, the rough version and the final version are both credited to French men - Bernard Lassimone, a French mathematician, who patented his version in 1828, followed by a refinement by French army officer Constant de Thierry des Estivaux, who invented the modern pencil sharpener in 1847. That probably saved a lot of fingers from being skinned, by the blades and knives used to sharpen pencils till then.
French physician Ren-Thophile-Hyacinthe Laennec saved a lot of male doctors like himself from awkwardness, not to mention potential lawsuits by inventing the stethoscope - forced to invent a listening device to measure the heartbeat of a woman. The only other way known to doctors till then was to place their ear over the patient's chest.
A selfie-crazed and obsessed country like India should probably thank mathetmatician and inventor Philippe Kahn for inventing the mobile phone camera in 1997 - after he rigged his phone with a digital camera to take photos of his new born daughter and shared the photos in real time with 2,000 people.
The British and the Americans may favour their pounds, but we in India swear by our kilos - and the French measure right up to our expectations, down to the last millimetre. The metric system, in use through much of South Asia, and not just India, was devised by the Academy of Sciences of Paris, under direction from the French National Assembly. The academy, using the decimal system, coined the term metre and first defined it as one 10-millionths of the distance from the equator to the pole. Today, of course, the metre's definition is based on the distance travelled by light in vacuum.