After a heavy lunch, I was having my routine tea from a stall close to my office. This place lies in the heart of Bangalore, where every two minutes with the signal going green, a flood of Traffic tears the silence, clouding the broad one way with dust and smoke. A kilometer long, it runs from a very busy traffic square to a flyover at the other end and underneath, it cuts perpendicularly another major highway. The road looks like a conveyor belt of a colossal machine where, in fixed intervals some assortments of goods are transferred in light speed. Along with a few corporate buildings, show rooms & a mosque, three residential houses have found accommodation on this very busy highway. In the drowsy afternoons, with the shade from small oval leaves of the big unknown tree and with the periodic noises from men and machines, the place offers me good five minutes break from my work.

That afternoon, a south Indian lunch was showing its aftereffect, so the sips of tea were just helping me to keep my eyes opened. Having a meeting to attend in the next one hour, I planned to destroy the drowsiness by staring at every single object surrounding me. I looked at the green tree, counted all the birds perched on its branches, stared at packed buses and observed every single passerby. Opposite to the stall, on the other side of the road, stands an old English style Building, whose owner must have been an officer in military or some administrative department. I have always fancied the building because of its antique look and greenery. The beige colored building has a 30 yards long front wall and three columns in the middle which hold two gates. A patch of plaster has crumbled from the wall showing muscles of red brick. A white stone is fixed on the wall and has its address engraved in black old English font. The garden gate gives a clear view to the garden space.

Although, I have known this building for quite a long time, I have rarely seen its household and the only person I know is, a mentally challenged man who must be in his late thirties or early forties. Around five feet and three inches tall, he is half bald and wears thick glasses which suggest his poor eyesight. Always seen him in knee length bermudas and round neck tees. A bicycle and a tennis ball are his only friends. In afternoon, he plays a one man game where he throws the ball on to the wall and tries to catch it. He has very slow reflex and only few times I have seen him catching, which he enjoys like some great achievement. If I make a statistics on his catch and miss ratio, he would make a very bad fielder with only 1 out of 10 attempts. That day I saw him playing his favorite game again. As usual he was dropping the simplest ones and I was feeling sorry for his inability to direct his body. I was almost done with my royal break and was about to leave when he missed a catch again and the ball rolled down to the garden gate. He came running after it and saw me watching him. Being aware of his one man audience, he pretended to be an expert. Hurrying back to his position, he threw the ball in full power, the ball bounced back with equal speed and he managed a good catch. Then, immediately he turned his head to check the audience in me. He pulled his tee back in a boyish manner, adjusted his specs, threw the ball and he took his second consecutive catch. That went on for some time, I didn’t move as it was interesting to see such a change. He kept repeating his feat and every time he was successful he kept checking his only audience. In the next 10 minutes, he had pulled out some 35 catches in 50 attempts, i.e. 70%. Certainly a huge leap from just 10%!!

That day what made him write a new page in his life, I am not very sure, but my 15 minutes notice and a mere awareness in his mind made him forget a lacuna which had hold him back from going with the time. A few days later, I saw him riding his bicycle but I am eager to see him play his “catch the ball game” again.

How our minds are programmed? Neurologically, I have no clue about it. But these 15 minutes showed me how a mind just needs another mind to heal.

Like, the blue colored creatures from the movie “Avatar”, we human beings also live in a network of minds. We see, think and act in response to others action and vice versa.

We live in an unimaginably vast network of minds, through which we all steer time to future