Sometime back, in the past.. I had read about this butterfly effect which stated that it is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state can result in large differences in the later state. I mocked at the seriousness of this theory, taking into consideration the intelligence of the human mind. It only took me a few years after college to demyth my jejune fallacies. To be honest, sometimes science students themselves feel that a few scientific theories have no applications in real life and are just an outcome of these scientists's crazy psychology. This irony is silently suppressed by the need of passing examinations and thus the syllabus is followed blindly. Coming back to the present, it must be innumerable times, that I see butterflies wandering around glass panes, desperately trying to understand, what is keeping them from flying out in the open space. Clearly, they are not able to understand that there is glass in between them and the open space. In such situations, I always catch the butterfly in my palms such that their delicate wings are not harmed and I free them into the open. I smile and watch in admiration at the beauty that God has filled in their delicate yet mighty wings. Today, a similar incident took place. It was a bit dark outside when I was leaving office. At the panel where we punch cards, I saw a beautiful butterfly fluttering it's wings on a glass pane as if trying to get out into open. I caught it in my palms as always, came out of the building and released it. As expected, I thought it will fly away somewhere near a tree or a flower or find a new place in the vast open space. But to my dismay, it flew back to where it was, inside the building near the glass pane. Maybe the light from the CFLs attracted it so much that it couldn't see the vastness of the freedom it had in the dark. A temporary secured place may become the reason of it getting trapped in the glass structure forever. I sighed at it's intelligence!! It's action however struck a chord with me. I realized, we humans too behave like butterflies sometimes. We tend to ignore the possibilities of exploring and starting afresh, only to enjoy the temporary comfort, we have made ourselves accustomed to. The temporary exposure to artificial light was what kept the butterfly away from flying out into the wild.. similarly a temporary moment of comfort has kept us aloof from trying new things, aloof from feeding the curiosity in us!! The engineer inside died a silent death in copying assignments, byhearting formulas for vivas and clearing KTs. No surprise, of all the 3 Idiots, Rancho...Oops.. Phunsukh Wangdu was the one we looked up to because he was the one who knew he had it in him. Something no degree justified, no 9 to 6 job justified, no merit justified, none of the things justified, which rest of the people had clinged on to, as typical success. His actions broke the butterfly effect which I observed today.. Breaking away from the temporary comfort zone and exploring out the zillion opportunities!! This small act will ultimately ripple into a huge magnitude of zest,allowing us to dive into the limitless possibilities, a human mind could ever imagine and where the heart would want us to go!!
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