The Peril of Love : Part III

The Butterfly Effect

“In the quiet suburban of East London, there is a boy queuing for an afternoon cut. The clock strikes four as the boy sat on the lumpy couch, having waited thirty minutes for his turn. Staring vacantly at the magazine in front, he ponders upon his decision to get a Mohawk cut; his new haircut would make him look distinct compared to the conservative neighbourhood kids of Leytonstone. Not to mention the fact that he could finally fit in with the cool gang at school and perhaps he would garner the attention of that uber cool rocker chick Lydia, who can play wicked riffs on her electric guitar.

Weighing the positive outcomes of his prospective haircut, the boy relaxes and breaks into a smile. Dreaming upon the chance of speaking with the illustrious Lydia, the boy is now adamant that this is the way to go, his way into her heart. In his mind’s eye he can see her now- the messy cut, badass attitude with a pinch of Goth thrown in, the electric guitar strapped around her shoulder, playing to heavy metal, nu metal, and metals that none have heard before! How is a boy who lives in the east part of London, who combs his hair from left to right everyday in the morning, who plays only classical pieces on the piano and listens strictly to N’SYNC and Backstreet Boys, ever going to be cool enough to be her boyfriend?

It is hardly the boy’s fault that he turned out this way; his parents are conservative Christians and a tad bit on the extreme side. Rock and Roll music are branded as satanic music, with Led Zeppelin leading the charge as the ambassador of Lucifer. He felt even worse when he realised how much his childhood mirrors that of the character Flanders from the Simpsons TV series. No, he thought to himself, “I would not be confined to the expectations and conform like a mindless robot, I would not be the spitting image of those loony cartoons from across the Atlantic...”

“Next!” says the barber, like the way people in clinics do.

“...ocean.”

Disrupted from his trail of thoughts, he walked across the room toward the chair in a trance, nervous about the event that is about to happen. As he stared into the mirror in front of him, the boy started to imagine how he would look like, twenty minutes from now. Nervous at the uncertainty of the impact of his haircut, his palms began to sweat, his heart picks up speed.

“So, what would it be Johnny?”

“M-m-Mohawk, sir,” he sheepishly muttered.

He heard a loud click, signifying the wake of the shaver. As the buzzing of the shaver inches closer toward the back of Johnny’s head, his body tensed. A drop of sweat fell to his cheek as he holds his breathe, embracing the moment. He closed his eye, trying to focus on the happy thoughts that he had earlier as his nerves sets in, only to remember where he left off, his parents.

The barber shaves off a small portion of hair from the back, but from Johnny’s point of view, everything slowed down to nanoseconds. His mind races from the anger that he would rouse in his house, to how his parents would write him off as a disappointment. In the end, parental opinion mattered too much to him as he weighed between the merits and his parent’s wrath, and subsequently decided on a heartbeat, that this haircut wouldn’t be worth it.

The barber moves the shaver upwards.

The boy panicked; he jerked forward and yelled “WAIT!” as everyone in the saloon stood wondering what had set off the boy to such a manner. The barber, bewildered looked over to his boss at the cashier and exchanged a shrug. The boy stood in his chair, shocked by his initial outburst, looks up and clears his throat.
“M-maybe a faux hawk would be m-m-more...appropriate.”

The inconspicuous Saturday afternoon turned out to be more dramatic than it needed to be; after all, it was only a damn haircut. Judgement day came when Johnny walked past the gates of Chingford Foundation School. To his dismay, his haircut yielded no attention from the said cool kids, and too much like a wimpy version of the true Mohawk, he got dissed for trying. His parents however, thought it to be a little too badass for the family’s liking, and that it has to be a sign of a rebellion, and thus cancelled the plans for his sixteenth birthday party as a punishment. Only his friend, David at the football academy thought his haircut was cool.


At the World Cup of 2002, David Beckham became the tipping point of the faux hawk cut.

“A butterfly flutters its wing in New Delhi and half way around the world, a tornado hits Taiwan. “

The butterfly effect describes how a single, tiny and inconspicuous variation may have a large impact on a complex system. Because every action or inaction inevitably results in a reaction, identifying the butterfly in a particular event remains to be confusing, difficult and subjective. Where the mere observation of the particles would result in an indirect influence of the behaviour of quantum atomics in quantum physics, life is not all that different.

Let us explore.