The Domino Effect

have you ever played with dominoes? If not, they are these rectangular tiles which are about the size of your thumb. The popular game played with them is to arrange them in various patterns on their edges and to topple the first domino in the series and watch them all fall over.

Life too is like a set of these dominoes. One innocuous incident could lead something else and that to something else and that could pull you right into the eye of a storm! Let me tell you about how I got thinking about this in the first place. It was 6:00am Monday morning and like every other Monday morning, I was up and awake getting ready to catch my bus ride back to Pune. Like every Monday morning I was ready by 6:45am and left my home. Now what 'usually' happens is that I go out and in a matter of 5 minutes or so I catch a rickshaw for the bus stop where the bus arrives and have a smooth 140km ride to Pune. Well, this is where the first domino topples over my otherwise 'usual' Monday. I was stranded in front of my apartment gate for about 15 minutes, waving at passengerless rickshaws as they whizzed past me like they were in a hurry to pick up the Prime Minister for a special ride. Eventually, after being rejected by 10 odd ricks, I finally get one gentleman who was ready to drop me to my desired destination.
When I alight the rick and run to the other side of the flyover, I find my bus driving away from me and I was left high and dry but not for long as it started pouring in a matter of 2 minutes.The umbrella could save me from the rain not from the situation I was in. While I was wondering what I must do next, I found 2 more fellow passengers who frequently travel to Pune joining me and being briefed about how we were deserted by the State Transport.

Was I late? Yes, from my usual timing I was behind by about 5 minutes or so but I was expecting the bus to arrive at its usual time which would mean I would catch the bus with 5 minutes to spare instead of 10. But there toppled another domino from another direction: the bus arrived 10 minutes earlier than usual! So all my calculations went for a toss and was declared late in the final analysis.

If I were to look at this situation from a Domino standpoint, I would find a completely different view of the problem. Many of the seemingly insignificant incidents started way before I got panicky about making it on time: like the bus may have arrived at the starting point 10 minutes earlier than usual, or maybe a change of driver and conductors meant the bus for once left on time from the starting point. Or it could be that school buses were on strike and many of the children were taking rickshaws for travel. Now, these are things I did not anticipate but if I were to sit and anticipate all of these things, I would have to leave an hour before the bus arrives at the bus stop! Where the Domino Effect really kicks in is where the choices you make change the course of the way the Dominoes topple.

Many years back, on a similar Monday morning I had left for school with a friend of mine as a pillion on his cycle and was returning back with him as well. That afternoon however, we encountered a pothole we normally would not have and I lost balance off his cycle and fell to the ground. To my good fortune, the truck whom we were trying to outspeed had a sensible driver and applied the breaks much before I fell off the ride. I was left with a splitting headache and a scraped forehead! Another similar incident was when I was to seek admission for 11th std. Junior College based on my SSC scores and missed most colleges by a narrow margin (in one case as narrow as 1 mark!) and finally decided to, in an emotion of utter despair, go for Diploma Engineering.

In each case what truly changed the course of the Domino Flow was the choice I made. In such situations God may seem like a really mean prankster who plays the most elaborate practical jokes on you. But the truth is that He is like this master-architect of your life whose ways and designs you have no clue about. We always fear those things we are uncertain of. We do not fear death but the its uncertain occurrence. We do not fear future but its uncertainty. But believe it or not it is this uncertainty that keeps us sane and enables us to affect change with the choices we make. Things may not always go the way want we want to but that would be like one of the characters painted on the Sistine Chapel complaining to Michelangelo that his robe should have been a little longer! The fella upstairs knows His job so we should just mind ours! If you feel like you are a victim to a divine practical joke, just laugh along with Him because he is the only one who can turn a joke into a miracle!

In hindsight every factor seems like a reason for the disaster. Of all the things I considered as a reason, the funniest I think is a point when the rickshaw driver asked me if he could relieve himself halfway to the bus stop. Now, I may have been in a hurry but I could not deny a man who came to my rescue in my hour of need his basic right of answering nature's call. It took him a minute or so to be done with it and to get his rickshaw started. It took me just that one minute to go from 'On Board' to 'On Road'! And that's the joke that got me through an otherwise aweful day with a smile on my face!

no No NO!

i was watching this ad by a famous shampoo brand which has some famous actresses violently shaking their heads and letting their tresses sway freely in the air as they said this simple 2-letter word, "No!". They say it for about 40 seconds or so and manage to hold onto our attention despite saying a word nobody wants hear! Or do they?

Its a known fact that people don't like hearing 'no' for an answer and yet they treat someone who gives them that negative response like superstars. And how often have we seen people who say yes to everything being buried under a truckload of favors unto others and having no time to live his/her own life? The response you give speaks little of your occupancy with work and volumes of your position in social circles. A person who says 'Yes' to everything is seen as a Crowd Pleaser, someone who just finished reading Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. On the other hand, a person who says 'No' all the time is seen as a Snob or an Isolated Individual who has just returned from a One Man Moon Mission and does not want to be in contact with anybody. It is a tough balancing act and it has a lot to do with what is it that you are saying 'No' to.

If it is to some favour someone is asking of you, your saying no most of the time would suggest that you are super-busy or have other important things to tend to. But watch out for whom you end up trying this on because you will not be favoured by those people in your hour of need. However, saying 'Yes' to every favor sought from you is detrimental to your health as well as you could end up living through your life helping others live their dreams without you living yours. An excellent way to look at these two kind of people is to flesh them out as Noman and Yeswoman.

Noman is a bank employee working in the Loans Section and has the Job of saying 'No' to many applications during the day (refer to the movie Yes! to understand the character better). Yeswoman lives on the other end of that street with a stagnant Personal Assistantship Job with a young entrepreneur and has the unique distinction of being a Bridesmaid for 27 weddings (refer to the movie 27 Dresses to understand the character better). Both of them led miserable lives 'coz all Noman did was refuse every opportunity of experiencing something new and all Yeswoman could do was help others have their dream weddings while she stood beside them basking in their flattery.

Both did the exact opposite of each other, yet both were not happy with their lives. One afternoon when Noman went out for a post lunch walk down the street he bumped into Yeswoman and dropped the bride's dress and cake she held in her dainty hands. He picked her up, apologized and agreed to pay for the losses. She accepted the apology and agreed with his idea. Later that week he asked her out to dinner and she joined him by giving her friend's rehearsal dinner a slip. And guess what before they knew it, their lives were slowly being transformed. In the following summer she quit her dead end job and was living her life as a successful Marriage Consultant for which she procured a loan from Noman's contact at his bank. He too progressed in his bank after taking proactive steps and promoting micro-credit. The following year, the two were planning their own wedding and were moving into a new house which the two of them had purchased from their new found careers.

So I guess it is not so much the response that matters but your feelings for a particular response. If someone comes asking you for something you don't have the time nor the inclination to do, say NO, for goodness sake, for your sake. And if you wish to do something for someone because you really want to, then just do it! If you worry about what the world will think of you if you accept/ refuse someone, let me give you the red pill of reality: the world does better than make opinions of your every action or inaction. Besides, most of the people who form this little critique world of yours are probably those who have needed or will need your favor sometime, so to hell with them!

Having said that, I don't mean that good old charity goes out the window. I think it takes a lot of planning to live a fulfilling Life and one needs to introspect on ones goals and priorities regularly to know where we are headed. The world is one Big Place and Life is one Long Story. Lets give everyone a balanced diet of Ayes and Nays to help them stay healthy!

Bits Of Paper: Who's Gonna Pick 'em Up?

every generation has a philosophy which drives it. Like our parents are driven by the philosophy of hard work and perseverance and learning and we are driven by smart work and unlearning and relearning. We often hear of our grandparents speak of the good old days when working in the fields brought them great joy and peace of mind and how our parents would complain of their 2nd shifts in factories. And now we get to hear stories of how a hard day's work on the company shop floor, working with machinery brought our folks great satisfaction and peace of mind and how that experience is hard to find in front of a computer screen! I guess we too will have our turn to tell our children of the immense pleasure and job satisfaction working on unfinished codes for a web-based application brought us compared to their voice command controlled supercomputers which writes the codes and documents for them based on the requirements they dictate to their workstations!

Every generation thus defines the boundaries of the environment in which it thrives. From the pre-Independence environment of uncertainty and abject poverty to the environment of green and white revolutions of the 70s to the technological revolution of the 90s. Each of these environments had a particular way in which the machinery of society worked. And it is funny, but I guess when people say that 'Corruption and Apathy is in our blood.' it has an element of truth in it. Because in all our generations all we see is the need to wriggle our way through life and find societal status even if it means making our principles and ideals a sacrificial lamb. Most of you reading this will feel that if principles cannot guarantee us success, then what's the point in adhering to it? That's correct. But I don't think that's the reason why man must be righteous. Righteousness is for one's own peace of mind. The world could care less if MK Gandhi were called the 'Mahatma' or if Mother Teresa is worthy of being called a 'Saint'. If they followed their principles they did so because they wanted to live a life of peace and a clear conscience. That they became a source of inspiration to the generations after them is just a positive after-effect of their piety.

And so if we wish to see 'Real Change' around us; change that is not just part of some ad campaign of a company trying to peddle its products under its banner, change that is not just some fancy slogan to create mass hysteria and a pseudo-active state of our consciousness; we need to shut up and look inside us. We need to understand that Change is not something the world needs but it is something that we need: to find our peace of mind. And our effecting it and cleaning the mess we make will define in the annals of history the true philosophy of the life and times of our generation.