I woke up late. The corporate-law II paper was to start at 9:30. I could manage to get in the car only at 8:30.
The drive, much like television, puts one in a state of sleep. My thoughts were wandering aimlessly to elsewhere while scenery was pouring in through the six windows of the car.

Just before womens college, I saw three women, all of them municipality workers. They were sweeping the road with over-sized brooms. Amazingly, they were sweeping in synchronization.

It looked much like a dance.

I paused for a moment to wonder, what probability is there of such a thing happening. Choosing to ignore for the moment, the seemingly trivial hypothesis that they were doing so out of mutual agreement or that it was an intentional performance of some inside joke that the three shared. It was obviously happening out of sheer chance, and I was taken back, briefly, by this sudden metaphorical experience of intelligent design.

The situation began to crystallize into concepts and questions. “Lets standardize the problem, if the women always sweep the broom in identical strokes, with only three observable position in each standard stroke. Then what is the probability that at a particular moment in time they would be sweeping in synchronized strokes……”
I realized that my predicament was clearly Vikash’s doing. He is preparing to write for GMAT, so he keeps asking me such questions. I was still left facing the problem. This situation was sustained for some time.

I knew that either, I didn’t know enough math, or that I did not have enough attention left, or both, and so I couldn’t arrive at an answer that I could be sure of, in my ignorance. On the other hand, I remembered though that it is an error often made while considering the paradox of the little probability of there being human life, and the factual reality that there actually is human life. People resolve this by attribution to the intelligent designer, some Godlike being. Intelligent people, who understand evolution, attribute it to chance.

But I still could not face up to my ignorance in mathematics. I needed to learn math. Math is a language too, the language of nature, as some famous science guy once said. I am all for learning languages. Limits of my language are the limits of my world, and everything.

Then suddenly, I was made to remember, by the random movements of my memory. I had attended this conference on Commercial Arbitration. This person who was heading Becker & McKenzie’s office in Hong Kong was speaking about how China was the largest economic jurisdiction for legal settlements. Past year’s legal claims ran into 60 billion U.S.$. He went on to narrate how the knowledge of Chinese language had recently become a necessary requirement for CEOs all over the world so that they could at least fight their disputes in the same tongue.

I was left with a choice yet to be made, but the university appeared in sight. It was time to write my 3 hour long examination.