Who wouldn't like to live life ONCE more or be rid of the ONE pesky neighbour next door or get ONE more like to one's FB post or that the dinner bill at Hotel Taj have ONE zero less, or wish one weren't just ONE day late in paying credit card bills or home loan EMI ,or arrive ONE second before the traffic lights turn red , or that ONE and ONE make eleven ,not two, or that the party host doesn't grudge ONE for the road .....the wish list is endless. Life is all about hits and misses, some agonisingly close ,just a matter of ONE more or ONE less !
This 'one' thing in no frivolity. Don't believe it ,then read on . It has had profound impact , changing courses of history or destinies of men and nations. In fact , it has determined our very existence.
Yes ! our very existence ! Indisputably now, the universe began with a Big Bang. An Infinitesimal point at an infinite temperature some 13.7 billion years ago exploded creating, space and time. All matter too emerged out of it. So did anti-matter that sought out matter for a deathly embrace and mutual annihilation, leaving just mass-less energy in its wake . Had it not been for a quantum quirk ( the quantum roost of the micro-world of elementary particles has many idiosyncratic strands like certainty of 'uncertainty', reality of 'virtual' particles.....) that for every billion of anti-matter , the Big Bang produced one billion and ONE of matter. That extra ONE survived to give substance to the stars, the universe and the cellular fabric of which we are made. Otherwise, the universe would have just been an ever expanding expanse of desolate, matter less ,lifeless dark void.
By God's design ,we survived this one and another by a whisker. If the percentage of Oxygen in total matter in the universe had been ONE percent less, earth would have been as sterile as Mars. Why ? There would have been no oxygen at all, for one percent is all there is. .
Well, our existence as a human too owes much to this 'ONE' fortuity. But for ONE chromosome ,we would have been Chimpanzees living on trees ,sporting a tail. We would be having the same 24 chromosomes. One good thing would have happened, the rape of our eco-system would have been avoided.
Never mind , we as humans moved on, setting up distinctive civilisations in different geographies and climes, among them our own Vedic culture. At a self destruct moment in the evolution of Indian civilisation, Duryodhana refused to give ONE village to each Pandava ,triggering a fratricidal war , Mahabharata, as bloody as WW I . That surely shaved off Bharata's civilisational gains by a couple of centuries at the least . What if Duryodhana had not committed the epic folly of choosing the Yadava legions over the ONE man army, Lord Krishna ? Would he have won the war ? Evil that he was, would Bharata have seen a rule of the devil ? My heart just missed ONE beat !
Let's take an episode from a more recent period of history. In 1452, Orban,an arms seller, made a cannon for the Byzantium army. The emperor ,however, had no money to buy it ,so Orban sold it to the Ottoman Sultan. Next year the Sultan made good use of the cannon to blast a hole in the defensive wall of Constantinople ,the capital of Byzantium, through which the Turks poured in to pillage and erase Byzantine from the pages of history. But for ONE cannon Byzantium may have lived on !
Being a cricket enthusiast one miss I most rue - failure of Sir Donald Bradman to hit ONE boundary before calling it a day. With 6996 Test runs from 80 innings and 10 not outs that was what he needed for a career batting average of 100, no more no less.
Finally the golden miss. Platinum must be disappointed that the starry cauldrons that created all elements failed to put one more proton in its nucleus, to make it golden. It needed one to add to its 78 to attain the atomic number of Gold.
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