(Disclaimer - The incidents from my life mentioned below are purely fictional)
"It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world." - Chaos Theory (Quote stolen from Wikiquote!)
Based upon this was a movie"The Butterfly Effect". In that the main protagonist repeatedly goes into past and change one incident. That leads to a series of incidents - intended and unintended that alter the course of his life.
What if we were allowed to go to past and change one thing? Putting it in another way had one thing in past, how insignificant it might sound had been different, how differently we could have been placed as of now. Say, for instance, in my first day in college had I reached the bathroom couple of seconds earlier, I would have found it unoccupied, I wouldn't have been late in taking bath and hence reaching the class. That day I could have sat in the first bench of class and maybe the chain of events would have led me to perform well, and who knows I could have been a scientist. Or I could have found a seat next to a nice chick and would have stuck a nice conversation with her and had been dating her. Or I could have sat next to the would be so-called-'Don' of our batch,( and couldn't get the seat as I was few minutes late) and had become a notorious 'goonda' in the locality and maybe ended up being a criminal. Far-fetched it may seem, but who knows how various factors would have shaped up!
Maybe, that extra right answer in my HSC would have put me in a completely different place, and my life would have taken a completely different course; or had I not been given out wrongly in the school cricket match in class 6, things would have been completely different.
We might have, at some point of time read or pondered or heard someone ponder over questions like
What if Hitler had won the world war?
or What if India and Pakistan had not separated?
or what if XYZ government had come to power?
et al.
These are quite big "what ifs", even a seemingly insignificant "what if" could have altered the course of things, and things as of today would have been altogether different.
5 comments:
"What if I ask you a hypothetical question, Nikesh?" :D
There's this wonderful movie about "what if" : "Mr.Destiny", starring Michael Caine and James Belushi.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100201/
On a slightly nerdier note,
I reckon u've heard of this:
'What if' is the theory of parallel universes. It goes something like this - At the quantum level,each event that occurs will have alternatives.At every differential time unit, the universe splits into the different alternatives. Our universe is just one of many alternate parallel universes. In some other universe, I am , as of this moment, playing football for Liverpool and earning a gazillion pounds a week, in another, dolphins evolve into a higher lifeform than humans....Perfect stuff for Sci-Fi movies. Especially if there can be a "pathway" between universes.
What if I don't answer this question?
Maybe ... I'll miss some valuable insight by Sirjee and others and couldn't become a great sci-fi movie maker then !!!
Mind-boggling insights!
2^2^2 ... ^2 (dunno how many times ... but probably more than infinite!!) universe ... and (2^2^2 ... ^2)C2 Pathways!!! (Infrastructure sector is booming!)
The giant supercomputer controlling the universe will hang ... (If only God was a computer engineer :P !!!)
Hmm....
Seems like the two insanely sane "32" members (read Rathi and Myshki) are back at trying to unnecessarily complicate a seemingly simple theory so as to make it incomprehensible for mediocre persons like me...:))
As far as "What if...." question is concerned i think Rathi even if u had reached class on time that day and ended-up becoming a scientist/lover/gunda but still u would have asked one day "What if i had reached class late that day??"
Life is like a nested if..else loop . What u end up becoming depends on ur choices and that choice leads to a series of events. Similar to a nested if...else there is no way u can jump from one track to another only "an exception" can abort ur processing and u ll be back to the previous condition. In ur case that exception is u voluntarily leave ur MBA program at IIM and decide to do Engg again.... (Did it sound too much?? But then exceptions are always like this "too-much-unexpected").
Hey Vishal, too good software engg e-style thinkingz r there! :P
Tho,if the 'exception' is voluntarily, then its just one among many alternatives that are open to Nikesh. You can't exit from the parallel universe concept.
I say (In my best SciFi villain voice!)
" Resistance is futile."
;D
@Vishal - Yeah .. what if is present in every situation ... and in another parallel universe, where I have become a struggling painter i might be contemplating, what if I had studied mathematics properly!
... Waise the question of 'what if' is not limited to the choices effecting us or factors effecting our choices ... it might be even more fundamental. For example what if Hitler (at time of conception!) had 23rd pair of chromosome as XX and not XY. He would have been a female ... and all factors would have behaved totally differently .. or maybe in some parallel universe it has already happened :P.
btw ...If else loop may not capture the complexity of 'what ifs' ... we need a LOT LOT more powerful function for that!
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