It all started with (a) Blink. I finally decided to finish reading Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant, brilliant book that compels us to take rapid cognition seriously. You see, I have this horrid habit of starting a book and more often than not, abandoning it just when I am about to finish reading it. I’d told myself I’ll not pick up The Tipping Point, another magnificent world decoder by Gladwell till I am done reading Blink. But I did give in to my temptation and yes, I am now reading both.

I am hugely fascinated by the way our brain works — how we feel the way we do, how we are so sure about things we don’t actually have a clue about, how we fall in love or absolutely despise a person in the first two seconds of our interaction and how, no matter what, we won’t budge from that gut feeling. No wonder I am in love with the writings of the ‘noodle hair man’ (that’s what my son called him after seeing his photograph in the book).

Both of Gladwell’s masterpieces, I’d like to believe, are helping me make sense of my world. Yes, we do think without actually thinking and hell yes, small things do make a big difference. And I’ve lived these theories, just recently. My enthusiastic and inherently brilliant organiser friend pinged me a few days ago asking if I’d like to go for a tree plantation initiative with my son and a couple of other friends.
I said yes. In a blink! And am I glad or what?

So, yesterday was the big day. The day when I and my son got to be one in a million—literally! We got to plant one of the million trees that will be making Gurgaon a better place to live in. Much a grand statement? Well, there are two ways of looking at the situation.

1.  What can one little sapling do to the monster-like concrete jungle of Gurgaon?
2.  Why not start? Make a beginning? Be a part of something that makes the promise to plant trees that can last 70 to 100 years? Why not get involved? Do something more than just seeing the attractive hoardings at red lights? 

I chose to go with Option 2. So there we were. Three mothers with their three musketeers spending the beautiful breezy evening in the picturesque Aravalli Biodiversity Park that looked splendid as the sun dived into the clouds. The boys had a blast — they got a huge playground to run in, saw an aircraft zoom past the gloriously golden-blue sky every ten minutes or so, got to take a tractor ride (tractors were ferrying the enthusiastic environmentalists to the plantation spot) and got ‘champion tree planter’ certificates. The biggest joy of them all — they got to plant trees! And ah, we also ‘adopted’ a tree. The donated money, we were told, will be used for the upkeep of ‘our’ plant for three years.

So what about me? Well, I am reveling in my faith in the noodle hair man. This small thing better make a big difference!