Edge of Chaos

Last evening Darmint Cafe celebrated her first birthday. Instead of balloons and colored papers, Darmint was decorated with white plasters, bandage, saline and blood vessels. As my friends from the cafe explained, this symbolized a wounded society. A country, whose government is not being proficient enough to support against poverty, regular natural disasters, plane crashes (two in a month this time!), to name a few. And yesterday's celebration was a sign of protest against the powers that be. Most of the music that they played were in Bahasa Indonesia, but some Bob Marley numbers which were chipped in between hinted the pulse and flavor of this celebration. Among the peace loving people of Indonesia too, I noticed the threshold being crossed. Human beings, essentially, like to stay and be happy in their own small world. They are not much bothered until a limit is reached, which essentially happens due to the initiative of a small group of power-loving people. What pisses me off is the lack of efficient organizing capability among leaders, not necessarily of countries, but even of private sectors or students unions for that matter. Till the time this mismanagement remains within limits, everything apparently stays in order. Chaos takes over once that threshold is crossed. The same thing happened at Nandigram, a small village in West Bengal, India, where villagers were shot down by policemen and party cadres according to instructions from the state government. The villagers obstructed against setting up a special economic zone at the place where their cultivable lands lay. This industrialization, if properly planned and organized, would have possibly changed the economy of West Bengal (and Calcutta for that matter) to a large extent. But what happened is that at a crucial junction the order broke up and chaos took over. Lately, it seems, the tolerant mass of the United States have started to organize demonstrations against Mr. Bush and his government. After four fucking years of the war! Possibly this was expedited after the Democrats took over the Congress this year. There too, the edge of chaos has been reached. Chaos Theory is all about crossing this threshold, thereby upsetting normalcy. It happens everywhere, nature being the best example. The Butterfly Effect (a primary proposition of the Chaos Theory) says the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in Taipei can result in a tornado in New Mexico. [Wiki: Small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system... Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.] Even families are not devoid of this theory. Global warming! Lately some words are being spoken, but who knows. In 'Jurassic Park' (the book, not the movie), Michael Crichton wonderfully demonstrates the inconceivable repercussions that may take place once the edge of chaos is crossed.