THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT!

Some days, it just does not happen right !! or might I say , everything works out so perfectly wrong! ,yesterday was one such day .. I had gone to my cousin ‘s house at Nerul, some three stations away in a zest to watch the Champions league Final. Not that I am an avid football freak , but of late ,I had been developing some interest in the sport , the effect of FIFA 2009 Game fiasco I reckon. The Night’s game was not very refreshing though – ManU, the team I supported lost 2-0 to Bacelona!! And staying awake till 2.00 in the morning and watching E’to and Messi hammer Sir Alex Ferguson’s hopes was not at all helping my spirits and worse, I had to go to work the next day , which meant that I had to be up by 6:30 at least to leisurely get to the station by 7.30 . So the next morning after struggling hard to keep my mobile alarm silent ,I woke up and rushed through the daily chores and made it to the station to experience the most vivid and vibrant part of my stay at mumbai “the Mumbai Locals” – as Will Smith would have said – This part of my life is called surviving the journey!!
So, summoning all the Supernatural powers in the Universe, I made let’s say the first mistake of my life –eh ! well not as dramatic as Mr. Five Point someone’s Chatan Sharma would put it , it was a small mis judgment which cost me heavy – ha ha absolutely dramatic I am making it.
I reached the station at 7:30 ,perfect! I had stayed in Mumbai and traveled by the local train for a month now, I was no novice, in fact my ego got the better of me , For a split moment I started considering myself a pro in the business..
This traveling by train business here has a well defined set of rules , or so I thought , all the players in this game adhered to two theories- Von Neumann’s “ Game Theory” where they played a Zero Sum game and tried to increase their utility function ,always having a dominant strategy to play- Experience I must confess..OR they would play by the simple game that Darwin proposed several generations ago- “Survival of the fittest..” The Book Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins would make more sense than ever if you ever got to travel by a Mumbai local!!lol
Anyway I decided to follow the Mumbai game rule- “Go Back and run ahead”.. ha ha not an easy concept to follow , but that s how travel in Mumbai Works “If you want to go to panvel from CST , then even though the train starts from CST , One needs to take the train to the next station and travel backwards in order to get a comfortable seat to panvel”- a crisp and clean logic and amazingly simple way it seems to travel ! But hey, the catch here is Asymmetry of Information , not every one knows which train that comes back goes to their destination – Kenneth Arrow would not have thought of this impossibility frontier when he proposed the arrow-debreu markets model.. Anyway , so as I was in a state of illusion and pride ,I decided that I had grown into a mumbaikar , and so I decided to go from my station back three stations and board a straight train from there to CST – Greed .. the devil got the better of me .

I reached the station from where the straight train starts – triumph I thought as I had made it just before time , wasting about 15 minutes in the process. I merrily decided to stand and wait for the train in the usual place ,but man- o-man ,the devil in me was invoked again , this time in the form of temptation.. There was this huge Fan ,in front of the stairs where the crowd was gallantly braving the sweat. I decided to take a plunge into this sacred place ,blessed with breeze from a huge ,roaring ,old, faithful fan.Just as I stood there thinking of how gloriously I had assumed the status of a Mumbaikar, completely blending in , I could see the train – My 1 and a half hour ride to my workplace arriving at the distance. My face lit up with pride and accomplishment . . But alas , it doesn’t take much time for the situation to completely change. Just when the train screeched past me to a halt , I realised my folly , the place I was happily enjoying the breeze was in front of the compartment reserved for the ladies!!I looked around to see what the other men were going to do and surprise!! There were only women around who comfortably made it to their compartment- It seems that the men –true mumbaikars had silently and deftly slithered away to the general compartment on seeing the train arrive while I was in a different world living my ostentious glory!
The rest of the journey is a sad story- standing on the foot board , getting pushed to one corner , sweating it out with the rest of the junta and finally getting pushed out at Kurla (half and hour before my destination) and then barely managing to cling on and finally reaching my destiny!! Poof –So much trouble for so small a mistake – I surely can label it as one of the mistakes of my life when I write my three mistakes of my life – lOl Kidding.

But coming to think of it – Have you ll heard of the butterfly effect? The chaos theory?? It talks about how a small flutter of the butterfly in the atlantic can cause a storm, damaging millions of life in the Pacific!
This is how I felt – If I had not gone to watch the silly match where MANU was crushed to defeat , I would have got into my usual train and made a usual journey- but No! I had to make the stupid decision of playing a pro , standing at the wrong place in the train and facing all the trauma.. and all because of a silly game of FIFA!!which got me interested in the first place-everything follows a sequence adding up to the effect - Go Chaos –GO!!