The Butterfly Effect

Do not frown at me. This is not about the scientific phenomenon called the butterfly effect, though that in itself is quite a fascinating notion. It’s a Sunday morning which started with the usual happy feeling that I could read the whole newspaper without worrying about reaching to the office in time. But as it turned out, I am bored to the death after reading two newspapers without actually enjoying any of them. So here I am, in the balcony of the house, looking outside for anything which can charge me up.

The day is certainly not sunny. The early morning rain still ensures a bit of cold air, and the clouds have not yet thought of releasing the sun from their stronghold. The silence has invaded the scene; the only sound being the hiss of the trees in light breeze. To my merriment, a cuckoo does try to sing occasionally. A tree branch has extended itself till the wall of the house. As I try to play with the branch, I see a butterfly passing in front. I follow its flight. It keeps flying around without giving any sense of purpose. Maybe the flight is the purpose and quite a noble one of it – don’t we still dream of flying one day? And fly to where? Nowhere in particular, just for the sake of flying. Get me high, let me fly. What good it is to ask me why? Soon another butterfly joins the first one and they start flapping their wings fast to outpace each other. They go up and down in spiral movement chasing each other, which reminds me of the famous double helix DNA model of Watson and Crick. For a moment I think they are siblings -if you can use that word for butterflies – who try to catch each other in a game. The other moment presents the thought of them being lovers with playfulness part of their act of love. I get this strong urge to get the camera and shoot them so that I can show that spectacle to my friends, but I stop myself. There are reasons behind that. First, these butterflies are no different than children. They get your attention quite quickly, you enjoy what they are doing and when you get the camera to capture the moments, they throw all kind of tantrums to escape the lenses. You just can’t get them in the right angle! The second reason is my selfish motive – I don’t want others to see what I am looking at. They should come to know about it through my words. Call it the reward for getting up early. But isn’t that meaningless? The nature treats us all the same, I am another you and there are butterflies to be seen by every one of us. Not only seen, but to be loved. The great thing about the butterfly is that all of us can love it. More importantly, we need not to be apologetic for loving the same object.

I remember a Gujarati poem which I used to sing in my childhood – rangeela rangeela rangeela patangiya (O colorful butterflies!) To these days children perform on that poem. Even I danced on those words with my friends Bhavik and Pradip after I started working professionally. A child within never dies, I suppose.

My instinct says that they suddenly stopped flying because they somehow got to know about my wishful thinking. One of them is now sitting on the branch which I am holding with both its wings folded together. It is a brown and black in colors. Unfortunately it does not appear as beautiful as it was in its flight. It looks like a small branch of a tree which could never grow beyond an inch. There I see why the beauty diminished. The life, and beauty of it, is in dynamism, in certain vibrancy. Jump around if you cannot fly. Play… Dance… Sing…Love. Let the flow go. Be the flow. Needless to say, the butterfly has started fluttering again. This time the movement gives impression of whirling of a Sufi dervish. I am already counting my blessings for the butterfly effect.

Here Comes the Independence Day

India celebrates her 63rd Independence Day today. Apart from the obvious cheers the holiday brings, the another reason to wait for this day is that the whole country clad in the tricolor to celebrate the freedom we got at the strokes of midnight on 15th August, 1947 after a long struggle. Not to forget the patriotic songs – sung by various singers, from Lata Mangeshkar to A R Rehman. But the mood is gloomy on this vary day of 2009. The reasons: The fear of impending drought the country is facing in the wake of less rain received this monsoon and the resultant soaring prices of food items, the scare of swine flu which has got everyone panicked etc.

There seems to be paranoia about swine flu. The health minister of the country should also consider taking chair of chief mathematician at some prestigious university – he didn’t help the country when he derived the math of one third of the country contracting the swine flu in coming months. Spread the panic, Mr. Minister; leave the awareness to the lesser humans! On my way to watch Kaminey (more about it some other time), I see a man on a bike covering his face with a mask to protect himself from the deadly swine flu virus. Nothing wrong in that, but what really gets my head spinning is that he has wrapped just a handkerchief on his head and he is actually driving without wearing a helmet! Anyone who knows a bit about probability would agree that his chance of dying contracting swine flu is much lesser than chance of dying by meeting with an accident, given that he is more exposed to driving in his everyday life and swine flu will be like any other flu as we develop some immunity against it over the time (Remember the farce that was SARS – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome?). What makes this gentleman so confident about his driving skills, and more so about the fellow drivers on the road? And we are not even thinking about fatal results bad luck can bring to a man without anybody’s fault!

This is not to say that we should not take precautions against swine flu; we should do whatever we can. Personal hygiene and care have no substitutes. There would be people who would die of it, not because they did not take care, but because they could not get the proper healthcare. With tumbling public healthcare system, we cannot save many people. We do not even have sufficient testing facilities to diagnose the swine flu, forget about curing people in time. There are not many good hospitals, those which are good have not enough beds and the list goes on. Even if somebody finds a good hospital, he may die on the way because the good roads are still a luxury and a few better roads are always blocked by ever-increasing traffic, evoking images of Hanuman’s tail in Ramayana which kept growing and finally burnt the whole Lanka. Probably the man on the bike still needs that mask, not for swine flu but as a safeguard against pollution. Scientists would nod in agreement that Carbon Dioxide is more dangerous than the virus.

There lie our problems - not in the swine flu, but in our crumbling infrastructure. We are not well-equipped and prepared to face the calamities, be it natural or man-made. Why there were no schools shut in other parts of the world? Did people stop going to malls and theatres? This particular Independence Day gives us that chance to introspect and prepare the blueprint of the secure future, at least secure from within. We Indians work better under crisis. George Orwell did not miss the mark when he said, “When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.” They say everything in India is by default, not by design. We need paranoia, indeed, but use it to improve our systems. Surely we will see better things in future. I am positive not because of my being hopelessly hopeful, but because we do have a knack of coming back, strongly and reassuringly. This will take time, we are not speed-frenzy – the mango trees take time to bear the juicy fruits, but it’s worth waiting for, isn’t it? And guess what? The mango is our national fruit!

A Walk in the Rain

As my friend Teju (officially Tejendra) left my home late afternoon, I sat in my room remembering the good ol’ days when we had endless fun together. He would certainly grin when I informed him that power went off the moment he left. It was pointless to stay inside the house, so I started for an evening walk in the ever-enjoyable Bangalore weather.

I like to look at the trees on the way. There were many coconut trees. It was amazing the way the concentric branches spread themselves out with the cloudy white and blue sky in the background. The other majority was the trees with yellow color flowers. The broad-sized leaves and big flowers completely crowded those trees, with little room left for even the birds. Two plants in a house defied the boundaries of the wall and stretched themselves out climbing the wall and iron rode grill. Both were laden with flowers -one with blue and the other with red, touching the mother earth as if thanking her for the nourishment. The bugle shaped blue flowers stared directly in the onlooker’s eyes. The red ones were actually many little flowers united to be big enough to catch a passer-by’s attention. They certainly did get mine. I spotted 3 foreigners on the terrace of the next house. The same power-cut might have brought them there. One of them was sitting on a parapet in a contemplative posture. The other two were chatting and having a drink.

As I turned to get back to my home, a cool breeze passed which made a flock of sparrows fleeing from a tree. I looked at its flight and realized that the sky was dark and it was about to rain. But before I hurried up, it started raining slowly. I took shelter under a tree, waiting for the rain to stop. Some other pedestrians joined me there and suddenly the tree looked smaller for all the refugees. The damn real estate problem everywhere! The half-grown tree anyway was not the ideal place and we had to move under a larger tree. The rain was lashing heavily now. I watched some coconut trees dancing in the wind and the rain. A lonely palm tree was receiving all the blessings from its stretched out palms – a reward, may be, for standing tight and not bending. It struck me like lightening that it was the month of sawan, the month for rain. Though Kalidasa started his epic love story meghdootam with ashadhasya pratham divase (the first day of ashadh, the day when monsoon starts), folksongs mostly refer sawan to describe rain – probably because of the slow and steady life-sustaining rain it brings. That rain reminded me of Prem Warbartoni’s following ghazal - not that I was in a somber mood, but it has some profound lyrical effect:

kabhi to khul ke baras abr-e-maherban ki tarah,

mera vajood hai jalte hue makaan ki tarah

(abr – cloud)

When my shelter-provider drank enough water, it started pushing some water down at us. I tried hard for sometime to skip the water drops, but it was no use. After a while, water was dripping from my head and my clothes were completely soaked. It was foolish to stand there, so I started walking back. Some of the trees were humbled by the rain, and so was I, completely drenched. Water was flowing down the street, and the sound of chhab chhab kept reverberating in my ears as I approached the home.