The Butterfly Effect

There was no power last night and my nerves were getting punctured by blood-thirsty mosquitoes from all sides. It was a drone attack of a miniature kind. The tortoise coil had given up and the tortoise in my arse revolted to uncoil. And so I went out, almost only in my 'bear' essentials. It was 3.30am and drizzling. The Imadihalli Main Road barely had a dog barking or a late-night cab dropping software coolies home. Silence was not golden but pitch-black. I had taken no watch, cell, money or even my house keys with me. They were all safely stacked at a place I could retrieve them from after coming back. After walking for a while, I reached the Kodi bus stop near Forum. Though without a watch, I realized it was 40 minutes since I'd started as it precisely takes that much time for me to reach there from home. The Kodi bus stop is near a circle that leads to two ways, one towards west and the other towards north. I'd always taken the western route as that's the apparent silk route to all amenities, luxuries or whatever you name them to be. Never before did it occur to me to take the visibly unattractive northern route. Except for today.

Due North, as I walked up the Varthur Main road, unraveling uncharted territories, I found there was life there too! By now, it was 4.30 and people had started commuting. People were as busy there as they would have been in any other part of Bangalore. Of course, what a ridiculous thought after all! Up ahead at a distance sometime later, I saw a silver stretch of water, reflecting the suburban lights, all calm and still. My feet were paining by now cause of lack of physical activity lately. So I thought to take a look of the lake up front and then go back home. The road kept taking blinding curves and it always appeared that the lake was very near. But it was only after an achingly long hour that I was able to see the lakeside that appeared so tantalizingly close all this time. Patience paid as the view was absolutely enthralling and somehow rejuvenating. So I meditated on the stillness of the water and felt that it was not still after all. There were faint ripples almost oblivious to the naked eye. And there was a stork, silently waiting by the edge of the lake to catch the odd fish that, with a poor sense of premonition, decided to take a breather. A bike passed by, the rider turning his head towards me. He was probably startled to see a lunatic sitting on a milestone in the middle of nowhere. As if I cared. Nonchalance, which had seeped into my sleeves along with rainwater, fuelled my faculties as I walked further up the acclivity, alone. It was when I'd reached the Varthur Police Station that I found something lying on the road. It was a red Jack out of a pack of cards that someone had probably dropped in a moment of celebration.. or accident. Who would celebrate in this dark and pre-historic part of Bangalore and why? As I contemplated that, sipping tea at a shack nearby, I observed the most obvious of things that had eluded my reasoning in the last few years of self proclaimed sane thoughtfulness.

I saw a vegetable wholesaler disembarking gunny-bags full of fresh vegetables from his truck. Street vendors had assembled in hordes to take away their share for the day that they would later sell to us so that we could get our daily meals. And then there was a frail old man riding a bicycle at breakneck speed, carrying four milk containers, two on each side. He stopped his bicycle with a jolt and very briskly delivered those cans to the local milk booths which still had their shutters half down. Just a couple of minutes had flied by as even the city bus drivers and conductors could be seen in greased khakis, mobilizing themselves for a busy day ahead. They started their daily chores dusting off the buses and garlanding idols usually placed above the gear panels. Soon after, they gathered inside an andhra mess to have breakfast. It was then that I wondered that the breakfast they would be having there must be the usual idli-sambhar or masala dosa which could not have been prepared had the wholesaler not delivered the vegetables to the vendors or the vendors didn't sell it to the mess workers. And if they didn't have their breakfast, the buses might start off late from their respective stops and the commuters - with a majority of them being students and IT professionals would suffer big time. What if I told you this could dent the future of India in a rather invisible way ? Woah, sounds far-far-fetched right ? Well , may be but given that such aberrations are fairly common in our daily lives, each one of them actually amounts to disrupting little cycles of productivity that involve a fair number of stakeholders. And coalesced together, such dropsize disruptions multiply ad infinitum to create socio-economic tsunamis that wreak havoc with our lives without us even getting to know about their existence. Sample this. For every ten minute delay in even an early morning bus ride, at least a dozen people reach their workplaces late. Say, one of them is a banker. It means another ten people at a counter having to wait ten minutes more. One of those at the queue could again be a cop missing out on a few files to be signed at his office and so on. The effect of falling dominoes that’s created out of this reaches far and wide and as a return of favour it comes back to you, in some form or the other. And you need not be a protective cop or a life saving doctor to have an effect on this ecosystem of productivity. You could be a school kid or a house wife or any insignificant nobody, or another brick in the wall. So no matter how much we try to isolate ourselves in cocoons of self-aggrandizement, we remain badly meshed up with one another in strings better left entangled. To come to the end of it, the low-on-glucose jogger in me finally gave up and caught one of those buses back home. Soon, I was under the cozy confines of my hand-woven jaipur quilt, hugging the oft-molested and sweat soaked pillows. The last thought that I had before sleeping was of the little girl on the bus solving a geometry problem with enviable concentration, unaware of the milling crowds and the honking vehicles and heedless of the dampness of the front seat on which she was sitting. I was once like that and more – a compulsive problem solver, bubbling with ideas and energy, passionate about every little thing in life and armored with a killer instinct that once rendered me lethal among friends and "enemies" alike. But today, I was just a disgruntled and disenchanted sloth who had chosen to sleep off the day at the break of the dawn when others were busy breaking even in their respective businesses. I could very well be accused of breaking the same cycle of productivity I had observed earlier and was a part of. And I, my friends am a software engineer – keeper of once, the most admired job in the whole world! Matter-of-factly, this makes for a poor recycled joke nowadays. Nevertheless, even today, the IT sector rakes in astronomical profits that supposedly drive the Indian economy. The aforementioned adjective of supposition is partly inherited because of people like me and possibly like you who choose to break one cycle after another, day after day, causing mass suffrage tantamount to a genocide in a condensed passage of time. At the other end however, it's the lesser mortals we pass by everyday who are creating fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, though not quite the CK Prahlad way. To cut a long story short, what I learned from this random outing of mine is: Life's all about creating values - however infinitesimal they be in scale, for yourself and for others. So wake up Sid, munch a handful of caffeine if that is what helps and sleep off, but never!
-Loo©zar 4pm 17/05/10.