Butterfly Effect in Thimphu

I believe yesterday was an auspicious day.  My uncle and aunt got shifted to a new place in Lungtephu. The astrological time to enter inside their new house was 10:00 am. So they had done all the packing the previous night and I taking some time out of my busy schedule, though it was Sunday, reached their flat in Changzamtok at 8:30 am to help them load their stuffs.

The otherwise auspicious day turned into a thought provoking session for me. We were having a quick breakfast before we started to carry our stuffs from fourth floor down to the ground floor where a Pick Up awaited to get loaded. While we gobble down a knock on the door surprised me immensely.

ONE COMES IN....... ONE GETS OUT

A new tenant await outside the door with all his things packed loosely and in a hurried voice ask us to make a way for him to enter and put his own stuffs inside! To me ‘My Goodness’ was the only words readily available to express the awesomeness of the moment. I had a mouth full of Ama Dashi and rice half way to my mouth which I had to lower down to really comprehend what was happening in front of me.

In the midst of our breakfast we paved him a way to settle things down. Meanwhile we quickly ate and started to shoulder our own belongings to the ground floor.

The two tenants gradually began to know each other while climbing and stepping down the building. And in the heat of our conversation we agreed to help each other too. That’s the beauty of living in GNH country but ironically the neighbors in the same building didn’t even ask where we were shifting to nor helped the new visitor.

HAPPY COMMUNITY STRUGGLING FOR SPACE

By now it was almost the auspicious time to enter the new house. We were in our new location in Lungtephu. My aunt asked a small girl (unmarried is considered to be pure and lucky) to lead before her inside their new house. A small bronze container was filled with water, a butter lamp lit and having some incense sticks lighted completes a simple Hindu ceremony of house warming.

MY AUNT DOING WHAT SHE DOES BEST

Interestingly we also had to invade the current occupants to settle our own belongings.

You won’t believe me, in Thimphu if a family gets shifted several families in a row also gets shifted to a new place. There is a chain reaction like the formation of ripples in a pool when we throw a stone.

Funny? Odd? Interesting? You name it………. But it’s TRUE!

[In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions; where a small change at one place in a nonlinear systemcan result in large differences to a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane's formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks before] source: Wikipedia