Triangular Circle

“Fool!! Watch where you walk”, screamed the three rickshaw drivers as they braked abruptly in front of me. At least, that is what I suppose they said, because they spoke in Kannada, a language I am not acquainted with, except for the sentence which states to the listener your claim that you do not speak the language, but which causes him to wonder how you know that particular sentence if you do not speak the language. I was standing on a white strip, with black strips on either side of me. The vector showing my path of motion lay perpendicular to the strips. Alternate black and white strips stretched out on either side of me. I was tired, having just trudged 2.4 km, or 1.5 miles as the British would say, or (2.5379391*exp(-13)) light years as astronomers would say. One and a half phases of the moon spent at home only eating and sleeping had reduced my stamina like anything. My destination lay right in front of me, a towering structure that seemed to touch the sky. I was almost there. But right now, I was in suspended animation. The spot I was standing on was, well, not a spot but a strip, a white strip. I was at the center of a circle, but I was also at the circumcentre of a triangle with the three rickshaws as vertices.
‘How apt!!’ was the thought that crossed my mind, and this thought in return sparked off a chain reaction which resulted in the end of the Second World War.

The kamikaze pilots had destroyed Pearl Harbor. In retaliation, the US decided to use something which had never been used before, the A-bomb. Final tests were conducted on a lonely island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the resulting output was dumped by Enola Gay onto Hiroshima. That effectively ended WWII.

Of course, the name of the island was Trinity Island, and I was standing in the middle of Trinity Circle, MG Road, Bangalore. That’s where my office is, on the 8th storey of a 13th storey (the constructors were definitely not superstitious, I guess) building where it is so windy that it is named ‘Vayudooth Chambers’.

Behind me was the famous Trinity Church, and in front of me the office building. I had escaped accident by the skin of my teeth. But that is life. And death leads to further life. And together they make up the circle of life. And the circle of life is watched over by the God, his Son and the Holy Ghost, who make up the Trinity. And the Trinity watches over the circle of life. So a circle is ruled by a triangle, speaking mathematically. And here I was in the middle of a circle, with my life in the hands of a Trinity of rickshaw drivers. So in both the short-term and long-term sense, my life was controlled by a Trinity. Incidentally, Trinity was the name of the lead actress Carrie-Ann Moss in my favorite movie ‘The Matrix’.

Thus did WWII end, and so did my train of thought .The black and white strips resolved themselves into a zebra crossing. I walked across to safety and to another day of work.