History Diary

Moments that Define Epochs

Seemingly inconsequential things can have an unimaginable impact on the world. In his book The Essence of Chaos, published in 1993, Edward Lorenz called this the ‘Butterfly effect’. The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings somewhere and causing a typhoon elsewhere. Ray Bradbury’s classic story titled “A Sound of Thunder” published in 1952 had predicted this effect earlier. 

The story is placed in the year 2055, when time travel has become a reality. A hunter joins a hunting party to travel back 66 million years on a guided safari to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex.  The T-Rex identified to be hunted would have died when a tree fell on it and the hunting team was to hunt it just before it died naturally to minimize the events that they tamper with. However, when the giant T-Rex approaches, the hunter loses his nerve and steps off the levitated path meant to keep the party clear off the ground. 

The others in the group kill the T-Rex but upon arrival back in 2055, they find that the world has completely changed. Looking at the mud on his boots, the hunter finds a crushed butterfly, whose death has apparently changed the present to which the safari has returned. Hollywood films like ‘Back to the Future’, ‘The Terminator’, ‘Looper’, ‘Idiocracy’ among others have used the concept of time travel and that acts done in the past have huge consequences for the future. Biographers have used this too. The 2020 biography of Kendrick Lamar titled, ‘The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar ignited the soul of Black Americans’ chronicles the “What if” moments during Lamar's life and developing career.

Simple acts have become turning points in history. Examples abound. The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna rejected Adolf Hitler’s application twice in 1908, so he enlisted himself in the army. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Sarajevo in 1914 was the catalyst that ignited the events that led to both World Wars. The Archduke was supposed to have taken another route that day but the driver did not get the message and continued on the road where the assassins were waiting. 

In 1945, the munitions factory in the city of Kokura was the target for the US nuclear bombing. However, cloudy weather prevented the factory from being seen and Nagasaki was chosen to drop the bomb due to better visibility. Vasili Arkhipov has been called “the man who saved the world” during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The submarine on which he was stationed was underwater and due to malfunctioning radio contact, the captain thought that war had broken out and ordered the launch of a nuclear torpedo. Two other approvals were required for the launch. The Captain got the second one, but Arkhipov disagreed, preventing the launch of the nuclear torpedo and averting a worldwide nuclear holocaust. 

Vietnam is the world’s second-largest exporter of coffee today. It owes it to the East German and Ethiopian agreement for selling coffee to Germany that soured in 1979. Vietnam stepped in to supply coffee and till today Germany remains the largest export destination for Vietnamese coffee. The ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011-12 happened due to the slapping of Mohamed Bouazizi by a policewoman in Tunisia and upturning of his vegetable cart that led him to self immolate. The ensuing days saw the fall of the regime in Tunisia and waves of protests in various countries in the Arab world.

Automotives and trains have played their role in being that metaphoric butterfly. It happened on June 7, 1893 at Pietermaritzburg railway station in South Africa, when Mohandas Gandhi was thrown out of a First class coach of a train by a white passenger. The incident initially shook him but then steeled Mohandas the lawyer’s resolve to fight injustices based on colour and race. He went as a lawyer to South Africa and returned as a Mahatma in 1915 bringing the ideas of ‘Satyagraha’ and ‘Ahimsa’ for the freedom movement. Indian independence in 1947 became the kairotic moment for the domino effect that led to the freedom of countries in Asia and Africa and shrunk the mighty British Empire, on which the sun did not set, back to the confines of an Island.

In 1884, it happened to a young schoolteacher named Ida Wells in Tennessee in the United States. Wells too was on a train. The conductor ordered her to leave her seat in the ‘ladies car’ in the first-class section and go to the “coloured” section of the train. She refused and was forcibly removed from her seat. She sued the railroad company and although she won the case at the local level, the ruling was eventually overturned in federal court. Recognising her contribution, the city of Chicago erected her statue in 2021. 

The eviction of Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 from a bus led to yet another mass movement and the November 1956 Supreme Court decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional. The movement also catapulted Martin Luther King Jr., into becoming a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement in the USA.  Nine months before Parks, Claudette Colvin who though in the “coloured” section of the bus in 1955, defied the rule that if the bus was full and white people got on, people in “coloured” seats should give up their seats. Colvin, 15, refused. She was arrested, imprisoned and charged with violating segregation laws, disturbing peace and assaulting a police officer. She pleaded not guilty but was convicted. Her point was made—the presence of melanin cannot be the basis of discrimination. Her biopic titled ‘Spark’ was announced in 2022.

Seen by themselves these were small incidents, they were in conformity with the law of the times but were applied on the ‘wrong’ person, the metaphorical butterfly wings that caused a typhoon and changed the course of history.
 

Puneet Kundal is an IFS officer working as Joint Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs