7/11/06 , Chaos and beyondRecent media coverage of 7 serial blasts in Mumbai local trains on 11th July (7/11) prompted me to update my blog. You may ask, "Is it really recent?" Or news of rescue operation of a kid called Prince is more recent. Well, thanks to first immediate action after 7/11, by our attentive government, i.e. blocking all the bloggers, in a large national interest, there is a obvious "postal delay" in this post. So it is recent as per me and more recent than the news of prince.
7/11 can be easily deleted from our short term memory (i.e. forgotten) , but not from the memory of those, who lost their near and dear ones OR who just had a narrow scape. There were few who had given up the idea of boarding one particular train as it was crowded, hence got saved and there were those unlucky ones trying their best to reach their home early with crowd without knowing that they were on their final journey. Just imagine a person Y, starting later than usual from his source to catch a train on that fateful day. He goes to the station, the train is just pulling in and he makes to it just in time in the first-class compartment. He shouldn't have made to that train - had he known the future. Isn't it all feel like a bollywood cinematic trick? Where 1 minute in the movie takes 2 minutes of narrative time (time-expansion). Can you see his beaming face towards his fellow passengers announcing that he finally made it? :-)
Then there was another person Z, trying to catch the same train, say from the same source, with plenty of time to spare, yet, her every step goes wrong. She receives a phone call from a friend and while talking to him, she misses her BEST bus. Manages to take lift from some "courteous mumbaikar" (sorry reader's digest, this entity does exist!! ). On their way to station, they hit red lights at every congested intersection of Mumbai and finally, Z just narrowly misses that fateful train. The next train from the station is after 10 minutes. So now she has full-time to have a quick bite of vada-paav at the station. While eating she realises that she didn't have lunch on that day. May be God was looking out on her. HE has been so kind to her. Now what would you call the opposite fates of these two persons? One was given opportunity by HIM to stay in this world by letting her miss the train and the other one boarded the same compartment which was going to blow away after few minutes. He becomes from *a regular local train traveller* to a *blast victim* in a matter of minutes. What is it that makes these two persons appear to have very different fate?
It implies, to put it in Einstein's words, "God does play dice" !! Isn't HE? He can control small events. Events so indiscernible, that mathematicians are inclined to label them as random. On the roll of the dice, traffic congestion at that very moment, untimely phone call, the precise departure of BEST bus, the precise arrival of the train -> Y jumping in, Z missing it narrowly !! It's all random. Imagine, your bumping into some stranger on the street and later turning of that stranger into your best friend ... This all is truly random...It has to be !!
But just reflect back upon a bit, are these events truly random? I would say, "No, they aren't exactly"? Nothing in the world is truly random. To put it in mathematicians' language, things like these are deterministically random. Since everything is rule-driven, so how could be a pure randomness generated from these fixed set of rules. The point is when too many of these well-defined rules interact, intertwine with other, the resulting phenomenon is beyond human comprehension and we are forced to term it as random. But if you think closely, there is
"Order in Disorder"->This is chaotic.
Chaos by definition is deterministic, meaning, that we can theoretically predict all eventualities given the pre-conditions. However, the few motions are too complicated to predict with our mathematical shortcuts. It requires good computer simulation to predict, which way the chaotic event would turn. Perhaps God has designed us to have these sorts of fundamental sensory limitations. So that, HE can mask his actions through these "random" or "chaotic" events. And that's why HE stays supreme !! Most of these random or chaotic events are self-folding so that their effects are dampened and they have a very limited scope. When they aren't self-folding, the effect may be what is better known as, "the butterfly effect" (Refer to "Chaos" by James Gleick) i.e. A butterfly flapping wings in Africa may give rise to a Tsunami in coastal south east Asia.
Let's take a simpler example, a mosquito lands on a snoring sleeping giant, sucks his blood and flies way. Simple enough, could have no consequence at all. However, now suppose that mosquito, while taking its food, had woken up that sleeping giant briefly, and this fellow just happened to be the mosquito-phobic type. He squeels and slaps himself in an attempt to kill the mosquito. A bullet-phobic biker on nearby road hears the squeel and the commotion, thinks it's a gunshot killing somebody and is distracted. Not paying attention to where he is riding, he hits a pedestrian girl. That girl was taken to the hospital (of course not by the same biker, as he is adept at hit-and-run), but was denied admission and treatment, because of flurry of injured patients in the bomb blast on the very same day. She lies on hospital bed unattended amidst all that chaos surrounding her and later dies of titanus !! Later in the night, somebody (again another courteous mumbaikar) takes her SIM card and informs her family about her death and her family learns that their daughter named Z is no more. What an evil fate? She was made to miss that fateful train to later die of titanus. In this situation, a small cause has had a magnified effect. This is known as the butterfly effect. How elegently chaos has linked two seemingly "independent" events on 7/11 evening through butterfly effect? HE definitely uses it as a clever way to disguise himself, knowing that we humans will always try to pin things down to root cause.
So when, Y caught the train or Z missed the train, HE was looking at both of them !! Isn't HE? So where this chaotic world is heading after 7/11? Aren't we living on the edge?
To answer these questions, may be we need "The One" to decipher all the rules of the "Matrix" !!
:-)
P.S. Pictures courtesy 7/11 slideshow of mumbai blasts from rediff.com.
