Two to One

Nikhil was attracted towards numbers from a very young age. As an infant, he would amaze his parents with his acute sense of counting. He was making basic arithmetic calculations with his toys much before kinder garden. Right from first grade, he would top his class in maths. He took average interest in the other subjects, but something about numbers appealed to him.

As he grew up, the talent turned into a hobby. He would notice numbers everywhere around him. Stairs climbed, the time taken in minutes and seconds by the bus he took to his coaching classes, the percentage of homework he would do without copying, the number of clues solved in the crossword and so on. He used to find something sublimely attractive in the concept of discrete quantities. You knew exactly how much you had and what you were working with. Five was five. Seven was seven. Exactly. Not a bit more, not a bit less. Exactly seven. There was nothing left to chance, no ambiguities, no unforeseen results. As time went on, his love of numbers grew into something more, a mental outlook which would treat anything it came across as a subject to be analysed and studied comprehensively, to be broken down into fundamental quantities. He applied his conditioned mind and love of exactness everywhere. One could see a reflection of the strictly logical theory of discrete maths in Nikhil's personality.

Nikhil soon realised that he loved quantifying everything because it gave him a complete sense of control. Emotions and feelings could be mastered if you could break them down into tangible quantities. Know thy enemy in order to conquer it. If he knew exactly what he was feeling, and all the kinds of actions which could influence those feelings in various ways, he could very easily change them from what they were to what he wanted them to be. Just like identities are used to break down the given equation to something which is desired. Everything can be broken down, he would say. Once his parents got into a fight, and he was in a bad mood. His seasoned mind analysed the situation. My anger is coming because of the following reasons:

1. I want my parents to be happy and they are not right now.

2. The fight, like most fights, is occurring over something trivial and is not worth both my parents getting angry over, but they do not realise it because of they are not thinking right as they are angry.

3. They are involving me in it, and I am not equipped with the gift of the gab to deal with such matters, especially if you consider point 2, that they are not thinking right.

Once this was formulated in his mind, the things that were to be done came logically.

1. It is not in my hands to change their emotional status right now since they are not thinking right as I observed earlier.

2. Attributing this to bad luck on my part would be right, but I cannot allow that to exacerbate my bad mood. I have to accept the bad with the good, as luck works that way. Acceptance is the first step to getting over something. Thinking about events where I have been in a great state of mind or times when my good luck has been prominent will help me forget about the current circumstances which I've already accepted as nothing more than a manifestation of bad luck.

And then, just like that, because he knew exactly what the situation was and what he was supposed to do, he felt better. Almost every time his parents got into a tiff, he was much better prepared to handle himself.

The funny thing was, his argument had hardly anything to do with maths at all, and the logic wasn't bulletproof either. Any psychiatrist worth his salt would probably find some anomaly with the way he was thinking. But it worked for him, maybe because he thought it was perfect logic or maybe he wanted it to be. His habit of seeking order in everything he observed and thought about may have helped him inadvertently by making him believe an ideal situation was possible. Happiness is a state of mind after all, believing you feel it may be equivalent to feeling it.

A similar discussion took place in his head when he was sitting with friends before a bottle of alcohol for the first time.

1. The obvious con is the risk of addiction and subsequent health issues, having not tried anything like this before I am in no position to say if I will be able to control it.

2. The obvious pro is that if I end up liking it, I will have another source of material happiness if it is under moderation. Moreover, one, if my friends are to be believed, which works in ways more soothing than coffee or chocolate. It will also improve 'coolness' standings with certain sections of peers.

He thought a bit.

1. Though cons almost balance pros, the allure of the new experience and what it promises to be is enough to tilt the scales towards me trying it. The only important thing to remember would be to keep the practice in control from the beginning so that addiction never gets a chance to kick in.

2. The improvement in social standings wouldn't exactly hurt either.

Even something as equivocal as love did not escape his synthesis. When he had a crush on a good friend, his brain cells got to work.

1. A yes would mean satisfaction of emotional and other needs. Also a better social standing among peers in a way. No cons, at least in the foreseeable future.

2. A no could risk the status quo as friends from her side, which is definitely unwanted. That risk has to be minimised somehow, even with a negative response from her side the friendship should not get affected.

Observations gave inferences.

1. I definitely have to do this as the pros heavily outweigh the cons but be very careful that I am clear about the current situation between us not getting militated in a bad way if she says no.

2. The best way to attack the situation would be to put all the cards on the table, including my calculations right now, so she understands I have genuine feelings and have thought this through. Being laconic in such a situation has the fallacy of being misinterpreted, as she may fill in the other blanks on her own, and her thought process may not be the same as mine.

She ended up saying yes, though she found the whole explanation of it rather funny.

As he grew older, Nikhil did appreciate the flaw in breaking human emotions into a rigorous system of logic. Sometimes, feelings could not be simply explained by a method of cause and effect. There was always a 'randomness' factor attached to them, that is why they were called feelings. Sudden changes in emotion without any prior warning or reason, the so-called mood swings were still not within his jurisdiction. He hoped to conquer it one day, to reduce the randomness to zero. But at the same time, he also acknowledged the beauty of the unknown. He agreed that a lot of times, a thing was beautiful and appealing to our senses because we could not exactly comprehend what we were feeling. The taste of chocolate, the puff of a cigarette, the way our fingers move to the beat of our favourite song, the loving embrace of a loved one and the feeling of happiness and belonging one gets while sitting with friends were not experiences one could always disintegrate into simple quantities. Sometimes it was better to let oneself go and not try to analyse everything. But all the same, he was interested in seeing how much he could help himself with it.

He would often share his thoughts about this matter with his good friend Mira.

"You have a funny way of looking at things! Don't you think that sometimes you're making things too complicated?"

"No, that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid! All I'm saying is a little planning goes a great distance in the long run in making things simple."

"Maybe, but don't you think that you are missing the great amount of thrill that one experiences by just taking the plunge? Don't you think that sometimes you should throw reason to the wind, and just follow your gut, doing what you feel like?"

"Actually, this way I actually ensure that I end up doing what I feel like. But you raise an interesting point. Maybe I am doing the same thing, only thinking a bit more about whether there are loose ends I missed or not."

"Yeah, I guess you are right in some sense. I mean, if people end up situations like the ones you talked about, they would think about it, even though their minds would be addled with emotions."

"Exactly. Maybe I'm just more formal about the whole thinking part. Or more thorough. Or more stupid. Who knows?"

Who knows indeed.