The Case Against Homo Sapiens

The patience and perseverance of the early hominins handed us the evolutionary gift of consciousness. We learned to pass down information from one generation to another. I am communicating ideas to you that are unfathomably complex for any other known life form to discern. I've perpetually wondered what animals, especially pets, think about. Living with humans, they watch us pursue increasingly luxurious lives and change the environment around us for the better. Yet, they show few to no signs of improving their quality of life.

We outclassed all other species on earth when our ancestors learned to make fire a couple of hundreds of thousands of years ago. Through a highly painstaking process spanning thousands of generations, we knew which plants to consume and which to avoid. It was only about twelve thousand years ago we began agriculturizing and establishing permanent settlements. At some point in the past, humans probably realized that they needed to pass down their knowledge and legacy, which they first did in an oral form, then in pictograms and proto-writing, and we came all the way to store and retrieve information in a digital medium. Our ability to communicate, pass down ideas, learn from history, plan our future, grow our own food, and shape our environment propelled us far ahead of other species. Today, we are collectively changing our world at a breakneck pace.

When we look back at history, we somehow think that all the inventions and discoveries thus far had to happen. You could read a million pages of history books, but nothing would truly capture what it was like to be alive all those years ago. This is because our brain constantly looks for patterns to compare with today's world. We don't know what it meant to not possess the knowledge we do today. The inability to forget or unlearn something is often touted as the curse of knowledge for humankind. I call this phenomenon the retro trap.

Sometimes, thinking about the cosmos helps put things in perspective. The earth is over four billion years old, but our lifespans are embarrassingly short compared to any of the natural processes occurring on our planet, like evolution, the formation of continents, etc. For most of humanity's history, there was no change in lifestyle between generations. However, it is almost impossible to imagine our lives without some or any of humanity's most significant findings. My parents didn't have a smartphone well into their middle ages, yet it is unthinkable for today's kids to live without one. We can only build upon whatever has been found or created until our time, which is why it is often said that we are a product of our times. We are bound by technology, political boundaries, religions, world views, and lifestyles of what exists today.

Our species is almost as human as our species was thousands of years ago. I use the phrase "almost as human" because of one significant advancement in the last couple of decades - a connected globe. With access to information anywhere and communicating in real-time, we seem to have left behind the epoch of homo sapiens and entered the age of homo digitalis. Today's humans cannot be separated from their personal devices, for they have become an extension of us, and our identities are defined by them. As Elon Musk rightly pointed out in 2016, we are already cyborgs.

Despite remarkable advancements in science and technology, we live in simpler times. Our creations will soon outsmart and overpower us. While we are caught up in our retro trap, it is essential to understand that our culture will evolve, political boundaries will change, and all existing religions will die. Our retro trap blinds our ability to understand the past as much as it does to prepare ourselves for what is to come. There is an urgent need to address some of the critical inefficiencies of our collective species. While machines can simply be cloned, it takes many years for humans to get to a productive state from birth. Communication between humans is still painfully slow compared to how fast machines can communicate with each other. It amazes me how quickly we've gotten here since modern computers were only invented over 70 years ago.

We soon need to evolve from homo digitalis into something more, perhaps what I would call homo bionicus. This is a case to move from natural selection to an artificial one where we control the evolution of our species. Computers are currently an extension of us, but they will need to become a part of us. In the near future, the line between humans and machines will blur to the extent that it would be virtually impossible to tell them apart. To avert this, we need to merge into one, using technology to address our inefficiencies. Some significant milestones we need to achieve are instant communication, immortality, and establishing colonies beyond our planet. We need to go beyond our inefficient physical bodies into something more meta. The debates of this time in the future would look much different as well, with some advocating equal rights as humans for machines. Eventually, we should reach a point where our species would achieve collective superconsciousness to try to answer even bigger questions like the nature of our existence.

The contradictory goodbyes

There are many chapters in a person's life, defined by various events that happen throughout their lifetime. There are numerous ways you could organize these chapters. However, I assume that the simplest way to look at these chapters in our lives would be as career events in their chronological order. For most people, this would be junior school, high school, college, your first job, then the next, and so on. In this post, I would like to talk about three incidents taken from three different chapters in the book of my life.

SASTRA University, Thanjavur, India -

I wrote a post over eight years ago, while I was still pursuing my undergraduate degree. It was about how I witnessed the newly graduated batch of 2011 leave the University, saying their final goodbyes to each other. Back then, I was apprehensive about the day (which was then two years away still) when I would have to bid farewell to all the friends I had made in those four years. The day came without fail, and it has now been six years since that day. What I would like to highlight here is that we all left that place at the same time, each going in their own direction. No one had the chance or option to remain there, for their purpose was complete. I went on to kickstart my career with Zoho.

Zoho Corp, Chennai, India -

More than the role, it was the people who made my career once I joined Zoho. From playing badminton in the early mornings to eating pani puris in the night, and all the work in between, I tried to make the most of every second to spend time with the friends I made in my workplace. Ultimately, after two years of work at Zoho, I decided to pursue a master’s degree in the United States and secured an admit, and so did my friends Neela and Santhanakrishnan. It dawned upon me that our days at Zoho were coming to an end, and our circle of friends would no longer meet regularly. Having seen and experienced many goodbyes in the past - the latest at that time was Ramakrishna and Aishwarya. They had left the company about 6 months before, I understood that the place was never the same once a person left. Because the three of us were quitting soon, I decided to make the first move to quit my job. By embracing the change before it hit me, I felt that I saw what was coming and saved myself a lot of the emotional baggage that I would have to carry ahead.

The University of Illinois at Chicago, USA -

Fast forward a couple of months to August 2015. I moved to Chicago and it was the days leading up to the start of my graduate program there. I remember telling myself that the two years of my masters would be over too soon, just like the last two years at Zoho. And that it probably isn’t a good idea to try forging strong friendships and expecting them to last. Little did I foresee that these friends would become my family for the next two years. Those two very hard, yet fun-filled years later, none of us shed a tear on the day of our graduation in May 2017. We knew that we were going to stay together for at least about a month from then.

But this time around, I could not be the first person to leave as I were to start my stint with Morningstar in downtown Chicago. These people - the ones that I laughed and cried with - found jobs in different cities and embarked on their own, different journeys. Week after week, a person would leave, and I was there to bid farewell to them. I did not have the luxury of saying the first goodbye this time, and the memories of these people continued to haunt me for the entire time I continued to stay in Chicago. Every road, alley, and building had something in it that would remind me of those two years. And till November 2017, when I finally moved out of Chicago, I steered clear of the Little Italy neighborhood and Taylor street, where all those memories were made.

They say that life comes a full circle, and yes, it did.

Qualms and the quirks.

Quirk (\ˈkwərk\) noun: An unusual habit or type of behavior, or something that is strange and unexpected; Something strange that happens by chance.

During my time at Zoho, an incident occurred that I remember pretty well. One fine day, I woke up to the news that one of my colleagues' parents had passed away in a road accident. Both her mom and dad were alive and healthy the previous day and the next day, they were gone. I just knew her by her name, and she probably didn't know me at all, but all I know is that this incident surely changed her life completely. No one planned this, but she had to somehow deal with it the very moment it happened.

Wherever we are in our lives, we have all had some important personal experiences big or small that have changed our lives. There are also a few situations which turned out to be beneficial to us because of the way we handled things at that moment. Particularly when it comes to our career, we are more like mad scientists trying to make a device on the fly for an unknown purpose whilst blindfolded. It is those things that we do accidentally and get it right that take us ahead in our lives.

Speaking of mad scientists, I am reminded of this memory that dates back to 2010 from my sophomore year. I found myself in a disarrayed situation, not knowing why I had decided to pursue engineering and what I'd do once I graduate. Just to further exacerbate things, I had a rather low GPA. At this time I had been to two sessions of the student run open source club at my University and found that there was another session scheduled. So I, along with three of my roommates attended it. Out of a hundred people who attended, we were the only ones who showed interest in being a part of the club and we went over to meet those seniors to their hostel.

At the time when students were scared of being bullied by the seniors, we actually found it to be quite the contrary. We met the seniors at their hostel lawn where they, as a mark of respect, asked us to sit on the lawn bench while they stood around us and explained about the various activities of the club. From then on, the number of friends I had among my seniors was more than that of my batch mates. I gained a great deal of knowledge working with them and I would go as far as claiming that I was one of those few students who made the best use of my undergrad college. Making up my mind to visit them one evening completely changed the course of my undergrad life.

Another such turning point in my career was my decision to pursue higher studies in the US. At the time I finished my undergraduate studies, I didn't even know that I had to take the GRE and TOEFL examinations to apply to the Universities in the US. At my workplace, when I found a few of my fellow colleagues applying to Universities, I thought that I too could give it a shot. As the tuition fee for international students is very high here, I didn't have the courage to talk about it to my parents. I thought I would just give up the idea and not talk to them regarding it, as they might feel disappointed that they wouldn't be able to fulfill my aspirations. But I decided to ask my mom and she almost instantly agreed. Had I not acted then, I wouldn't have been here now.

One last such incident worth mentioning here is my very decision of pursuing Computer Science. Or if it was my decision at all! While joining high school (11th grade in India), I had to declare a major beforehand. I had decided that I'll be majoring in one of the two science disciplines we had - Computer Science or Biology. Anyone who had known me prior to that would have put their money on Computer Science for me. In my 10th grade, I was so obsessed with Computer Science that I actually checked out a CS text book prescribed for the 11th grade but couldn't understand a word as it was full of cryptic variables and symbols. I immediately came to a conclusion that CS wasn't the right thing for me and decided on Biology. During the summer holidays which I spent at my cousins' place, my dad was filling out an application for my new school where he had to declare my major on the application form itself. He called me up to ask for my decision and I asked him to declare Biology as the major. My dad wanted me to choose CS and after a long, hard fought battle over phone, my dad gave up. But he put Computer Science instead. Two months into my 11th grade, my CS teacher noted my name as the 'most gifted student in Computer Science' in my batch.

All this said, I do think of all the possibilities that could have gone wrong and completely changed my life for worse. The incidents that I have mentioned above are only few of the many many quirks that have gone into my life. On an everyday basis, we all 'hack' through our lives, trying to make it work. Given all the factors that affect our lives, I really do not think anyone can plan it the way they want. We take our lives one day at a time and try to live it in an ad-hoc manner. Sometimes when I think of all this, I am scared if I'd ever have to do all of this over again, and if things may not turn out to be as good as they are now.

While it is essential for us to learn from the mistakes that we made in the past by recollecting all those bad experiences, I consider it equally important to revisit all the quirks that we have made in our lives that has helped us get this far.

Confessions of a procrastinator

On the 4th of August 2015, I undertook a journey that might perhaps prove to be the most career defining moment of my life. I moved from Chennai to Chicago for my master's. I was leaving home for two years at the least and I had to bid goodbye to the nearest and dearest of my family and friends. I quit my job at Zoho on the 19th of June and had a good 45 days in hand to shop for everything I needed to survive in my new home, pack them up and to meet all my friends one last time before I left.

I also had other plans. At the time when I had still been working, I had planned my post-quitting schedule - to take my motorcycle out for a ride to Bangalore, Bellary and all the way till Hyderabad, as soon as I had finished all my purchase. I had promised my friends and family that I would be doing the ride as soon as I quit my job. What was more surprising was that my parents didn't even raise an eyebrow and I had their full permission to go anywhere I wanted to. The most exciting phase of my life was all set to commence.

The very day after I quit my job, I woke up all excited and made plans to prepare the list of things that I needed to purchase. But as I had 44 more days in hand, I decided to make the list on the next day, and then the next day. And so, my routine was like this - I woke up at 10:30am, slept again at 1:30pm, woke up at 4:30pm and slept again in the wee hours of the morning. The time in between was spent on working on a few illustrations, personal and freelance projects. I started enjoying this schedule and over three weeks went by. I just had about twenty days left.

My mom was getting worried about the fact that I wasn't taking things seriously. She took a break from her job to help me out with all the purchase. She prepared the list for me and every day, we would shop for a few things. But it wasn't going as per what I had in my mind. The things that I thought would take a day to buy, took three. Buying clothes and winter wear took over a week. All the kitchenware, baggage, shoes and everything else was still pending. I had just over two weeks to go. But it still seemed manageable to get everything.

I had to make an impromptu jaunt to Thanjavur - an overnight journey from Chennai, to get some work done at my alma mater. That took a day. A couple of days later, I frantically made a journey to Bangalore for a day to meet my friends. My parents wouldn't allow me to take my motorcycle as I had less than ten days left now and I would be unnecessarily taking a huge risk. I took a bus, met six of my friends in Bangalore and got back to Chennai. That took one more day off my already messed up schedule.

In the end, I still had to meet a lot of friends in Chennai, but couldn't. There was no time left. It dawned upon me that there was going to be no long ride in my motorcycle, at least for two more years. That I had not kept my word on meeting my friends one last time before I left. I realised that I could have avoided getting into this imbroglio had I not procrastinated earlier. I'm not a lazy person, but unless there's an impetus, the person inside me simply refuses to act.

I had five days left. I had to buy stationaries, electrical items, make photocopies of all my documents, buy a few comestibles to survive the first few days, and so on. That day, as soon as I woke up, I decided to write everything down. I prepared a written list of things that had to be done. As usual, as soon as I had my lunch, I went into my room to take a short nap. But as soon as I saw the written list on my desk, it wouldn't let me sleep. I immediately took my motorcycle out to shop for everything I had on the list. It took less than five hours to buy everything and once I had done with the list, it felt as if I were ready for my journey. I had achieved something in five hours, which I couldn't achieve in five weeks.

I have used several To-do list apps in the past like Wunderlist, Google Keep, etc. - all of them have helped me remember all the critical stuff, but haven't prompted me to finish things at the right time, or at the soonest possible time. On the other hand, writing things down and keeping the note on my work desk seems more efficient in helping me organize my time and kill procrastination. This has happened several times in the past and writing things down has always saved the day. While I don't intend to make this article as a motivational piece for people to read, I really hope that this incident would serve as a fine example to make me procrastinate less in the future.

Why this hurry?

In accordance with the last few posts of mine that deal with old age and some questions on life really is, I felt that this would be the most relevant time to think and write on this topic. Inspiration for this post was kindled by a comment I received on my previous post that I had reposted in the internal blog of my company. The comment, by none other than the co-founder of Zoho, read "Every decade in your life will go faster than the one before". On reading it, I suddenly started feeling disappointed, giving a serious thought to how true his words would be.

I remember my childhood days darn well, much more than I would like to admit. The people, the thoughts that used to run in my mind, my crushes and many more - I have very fresh memories of them, as if all that happened just a few days ago. Perhaps the very first incident that got me seriously thinking on this topic was my friend Aishwarya's wedding. In the recent past (about ten years or so), I hadn't attended a single wedding before hers. Although I have heard stories of my college-mates getting married, attending a close friend's marriage suddenly made me feel depressed - felt as if all our youth years were over already. What makes it worse is my habit of listening to songs, keenly observing and remembering the lyrics right from my childhood. When I was barely ten years old, I listened to this song called 'Chaand Sitare' from the movie Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, which had a verse that goes like this: "Pehena ke taaj jawani ka, haske laut gaya bachpan", which roughly translates to "By placing the garland of youth on her neck, childhood smiled and left". As a ten year old kid, I had already started feeling depressed as if my childhood was over.

There's this uncanny link between growing up and seeing things change at a faster rate around you than you can cope up, a phenomenon that we call the Generation Gap, to brand our previous generation as being less tech savvy and apparently less intelligent. We have written essays in junior and high school on this topic without truly understanding what it meant. It is worth noticing that the world has changed at a faster rate in the last decade, than the rate at which it changed in the previous decade. Take an example - the first mobile content, a ringtone, was sold only as recent as 1998, but technology changed so fast that 3G was introduced in Japan in 2001. The first call via a mobile phone was made in 1991 and by 2007, there were 3 billion mobile subscribers, which rose to 4 billion in 2009. Take another similar instance - to reach a market audience of 50 million people, it took the Telephone 75 years, 38 years for Radio, 13 years for TV, 4 years for internet, 2 years for Facebook and only 35 days for Angry Birds. We truly live in exponential times.

It is estimated that a week's worth of an English daily contains more information than a person was likely to come across his entire lifetime in the 18th century. And the amount of information that will be generated this year would be more information than the past five thousand years put together. I hope all these examples would pretty much give anyone an idea of how fast things are changing. The speed at which the world changed during our parents' times wasn't probably half the speed at which it is changing now. Every new technology and change is quickly being adapted to. It is hard to believe that my whole family and relatives are on WhatsApp - the same people who once argued that mobile phones must not be used.

I watched the movie Shawshank Redemption around the year 2008, and there's been a dialogue that I have been remembering ever since. Brooks Hatlen is a character in the movie who is an elderly person and had been in prison for nearly fifty years. He is released on parole and looks to be over eighty years old by then. Once he is out, he writes back to his friends in prison "Dear fellas, I can't believe how fast things move on the outside. I saw an automobile once when I was a kid, but now they're everywhere. The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry. Sometimes it takes me a while to remember where I am. Maybe I should get me a gun and rob the Foodway so they'd send me home. I could shoot the manager while I was at it, sort of like a bonus. I guess I'm too old for that sort of nonsense any more." It makes me think that at some point of time, we might hit a saturation level after which we may not be able to cope up with the ever changing world. Time would have gotten ahead of us.

Thus, it all comes down to a single question - why is this world in such a hurry? Whom are we trying to prove a point to? Do we really need to accelerate change so fast that it would consume our entire life in trying to get accustomed to the changing life rather than just live it? At the current rate of progress, I felt that only the elite few who are privileged and can afford new technology would be able to embrace the change and the others who cannot would be left behind. But the way things are turning out, and technology becoming cheaper every passing day, I see people from even the lowest strata of the society holding a smartphone in their hands. While it delights me that we aren't really leaving anyone behind, and it is only a matter of choice, but not affordability to embrace this change, it still doesn't answer my question - why change so fast?

Startups are at the forefront of the industries that are making technologies to revolutionize the way we live. These are the kind of companies who are driving the change that I have talked about all along. I have spoken to a lot of people from the tech startup industry and have understood that the very reason they are developing their product(s) is to solve people's problems. But then, I have a feeling that the problems that they identified aren't much of a problem at all. Going out and buying groceries from the corner shop is being identified as a problem and they are solving it by delivering it to your house. What's worse, knowing that you are running out of groceries has itself been identified as a problem and a smart fridge is arriving, that will order your groceries for you without your knowledge so that you never run out of groceries! The only way I see this ending, other than an AI takeover or a robot apocalypse is that humans will be outwitted and put out of all possible jobs. There will be nothing much to do in this world for anyone except those few people who would make or control those bots. History has seen the gradual rise of human intellect, and we are currently witnessing the exponential rise of collective human knowledge to unprecedented levels. I can predict a break point at which it will begin to fall, but it would be safe to assume that it isn't until a few tens of decades when that would happen. It would also be safe to assume that it isn't going to happen in the near future, at least till the reminder of our lives.

Time - as we know it, and as we don't.

I asked this question to a few of my friends - "How much is one second?". The question wasn't from a spiritual or a psychological perspective, and I also wasn't expecting the answers in that way. It is a very straightforward question that I want you to answer to yourself before you read any further. A purely mathematical or scientific answer.

Technically, the International System of Units (SI) defines one second of time as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave light absorbed or emitted by the hyperfine transition of Caesium-133 atoms in their ground state (Just for explanatory purpose, don't bother about the details). What it does not mention is that the definition is only valid on Earth. First things first - The human experience of time is not an effective measure of time. To have a better understanding of what time really is, we need to consider a few other factors that affect time. In an earlier post titled 'The depths of my mind', I had discussed about spacetime and how time is different from the way we understand it to be. We know three dimensions - The X,Y and the Z axes which we call 3D in short. All objects move relative to these three dimensions. Along with these three dimensions, when we take time into consideration (which we call the 4th dimension) together, these four dimensions are known as Spacetime.

The foremost factor that affects time on Earth is Gravity. Our measure of time or our perception of its measurement is relative to the amount of gravity being exerted on us. It is said that the understanding of Gravity is the solution to many problems. In fact, the problem in approaching many problems is the lack of sufficient knowledge about gravity. We know that gravity is a fundamental and a naturally occurring force by the nature of which all objects attract one another. We were first taught about gravity as an attracting force back in our 6th grade and we used the concepts of gravity till we completed school, or even college for some. But from my very limited knowledge that I have gathered from my interest in reading about metaphysics, I understand that Gravity isn't an attractive force as taught to us. What's more, it cannot be classified as a force by itself. At the very basic level of quantum physics, it would be safe to say that all objects distort (bend or have an effect on) space and time. It essentially means that any object that has a mass has an effect on space and time in and around it. And the bigger the object (by mass), the more is the distortion. The gravity and time that we experience is therefore a distortion of time and space due to the Earth's mass. Let's take a very simple example:

Assume that spacetime is simply a stretchable membrane, much like a trampoline. We place a heavy ball (the Sun) exactly at the center of the trampoline so that it stretches the trampoline downwards. Next, we take a lighter ball (the Earth and other planets) and place it at the edge of the trampoline. We would see that the ball gets drawn to the center of the trampoline and falls towards the larger (heavier) ball at the center. Consider another case - while placing the ball at the edge, if the ball had considerable velocity that would match or perfectly negate the force by which it is drawn towards the center, it would simply keep revolving around the bigger ball. This would explain why Earth rotates around the Sun and doesn't fall towards the Sun due to its gravity. Again, this gravity is technically the distortion of spacetime by the Sun. But why and how is this distortion caused? That's something I would be curious to know myself. The best accepted theory we have on gravity is general relativity, which doesn't in itself explain why mass bends spacetime, just that it happens. We are moving right now through both space and time. Einstein said that these were not two different things but really one thing, called spacetime.

Now, that we have a (good?) understanding of gravity, let's link it to time and see how gravity has an impact on time. As discussed about Caesium atoms earlier, you may know that they are used as timekeepers in atomic clocks. There are atoms of other elements that are used in atomic clocks too, and they are the most accurate clocks that measure time (The most accurate atomic clock loses only one second in 15 billion years, so we are talking about that much level of precision). A direct relationship could be established by saying that time passes at the current rate we know because of gravity. The gravitational pull isn't constant, and it is different at different altitudes on Earth. Therefore, on Earth itself, two clocks at different altitudes would show different times, but the difference would be extremely small as the difference in gravity itself would be very small. Establishing a more precise relationship, time passes slower where gravity is higher. Time on the top of a mountain would pass faster than time near the core of the Earth. But considering this very short distance, the effect would be negligent.

Take an out of the Earth example - clocks on the International Space Station and on the satellites run at a slower pace than the ones on Earth. This shows that gravity bends time in its own way. This phenomenon of time being affected by gravity is known as Gravitational Time Dilation. Take a bigger example of astronauts traveling at a very fast speed to some place and then getting back to Earth. When the astronauts return back to the Earth, they find that they haven't relatively aged as much as the people on Earth have (the basis on which the Interstellar movie was made). Time has passed slower for them, while it has passed faster for those on Earth. Although everyone experiences the effect of time dilation, nobody notices a difference within their own frame of reference (the place they exist).

To simplify, velocity and gravity each slow down time as they increase. Velocity has increased for the astronauts, slowing down their time, whereas gravity has decreased, speeding up time (the astronauts are experiencing less gravity than on Earth). Nevertheless, the ISS astronaut crew ultimately end up with 'slower' time because the two opposing effects are not equally strong. The velocity time dilation (explained above) is making a bigger difference, and slowing down time. The (time-speeding up) effects of low-gravity would not cancel out these (time-slowing down) effects of velocity unless the ISS orbited much farther from Earth. Now, if an object were to move faster, at the speed of light, theoretically, there would be no lapse of time at all - which means that if an astronaut were to travel in a spaceship at the speed of light, he would never become older. Let's say that you are on a chair and spin really fast. It would mean that parts of you are aging at different rates. If you could measure accurately enough, your head and your feet are not the same age!

Now that we have discussed so much about spacetime, the next time you go to the beach to watch the tides, do remind yourselves that the cause of those tidal forces is due to the varying strength in the spacetime distortion with position in space. Not quite simple to think of it that way, is it? I thought life was easier when I simply believed that it was due to the Moon's gravitational pull :)

If you have some more information or explanation on any of this, I'd be glad if you could share it in the comments section below. Do share this article if you found it to be informative :)

Edit: I found this answer on Quora that deals with bending space and time. Quite thoughtful.

Two strangers, one road.

I almost forgot about this incident that I'm writing about. This was rekindled by a piece that I read last week, which made me put my experience in words too.

A lot of Indian movies have this introductory scene where the guy and girl meet on the road as strangers and it proves to be a life changing moment for both. Well, this story is nothing of that sort, except that I met a girl on the road only to see her never again. This happened on the late evening of the 27th of February. I was stuck in traffic on NH4, a small stretch of which I need to travel while commuting from/to office. The road gets too crowded on Fridays owing to the traffic due to people travelling to the city for the weekend. A large number of buses and lorries enter the city on Fridays and almost block the entire stretch that I need to cover.

Somewhere in the middle of the stretch, I found myself stuck behind two lorries and innumerable other vehicles that stood in front of them. I turned off my bike's ignition and stretched out my hands, cracked a few knuckles and turned my head from side to side. Towards my right, I noticed a pretty girl on a scooter stuck in the traffic just like me, who immediately caught my attention (ahem!). Maybe it wasn't her that caught my attention, but there was something quite unusual about what she was doing. She was restless, she kept standing up from her scooter and looking from side to side if there was some gap through which she could squeeze her scooter and get ahead. It looked as though she was rushing to some place, or she was in some kind of emergency, or for whatever reason it was - it definitely looked like she was desperate to get through the traffic quickly.

I noticed a small gap just enough for a two-wheeler to get through, towards the extreme left of the road. I turned the ignition on and turned my bike towards my left. I took one last look at her to check what she was up to, when I found her looking at me. I pointed towards my left, signalling that there was some space to get through and I started driving. She immediately understood and followed suit. It led us ahead of a lot of vehicles, and with some constant twists and turns, we found ourselves covering a lot of ground and it directly led us to the signal, which just turned green as we got there.

We approached the signal near MGR University when I saw a mini-lorry (or call that a mega-sized autorickshaw) in front of me which I was about to overtake from the left and she was on the right. She stretched her hand out and made a gesture, asking me to slow down and not overtake the vehicle. I understood her intention only after I saw what happened next - a motorist from the opposite lane jumped the signal and took a turn towards his right crossed the road right in front of me. Had I accelerated, I would have had to apply the brakes in haste or might have hit him. I did not look at her or thank her for what she did, and just kept driving. It simply didn't strike me that I had to thank her for it. We reached the place where the road branches into two and I had to take the left to reach Anna Nagar. I looked towards my right and looked at her. She looked at me and nodded her head (and probably said something too). I nodded my head in return and took the road on the left, only to see her never again.

This brought two thoughts in my head -

1. Instant Karma - what I had done came back to me. Instantly.
2. Faith in humanity, restored.

P.S: Santhanakrishnan and Neela are two of some of the guys to whom I give an 'exclusive preview' of my upcoming posts for proofreading and feedback. While Neela says that I could have chased the girl down instead of going home, Santhanakrishnan goes as far as asking me if I remember her face, her vehicle's registration number and any additional details, so that they can track her down. Crazy friends I've got!