The Man Who Became a Cloud

If there was one thing that defined Edward Pillai, it was hours of immense frustration!

He could get frustrated very fast. In a way it was a good habit, it had helped him transcend a lot of boundaries in life. During school If he didn't crack a particular maths problem and got frustrated, he attacked it with renewed vigour. He forgot to eat, sleep, talk to his family - as he spent night and day trying to solve it. Patience wasn't his biggest virtue so he wanted to finish it really really fast. Eventually, when the problem got solved, his frustration vanished in an instant, the oxygen supply in his brain increased, his ears felt lighter as if he could hear every small sound, his eyes brightened up and a rare song or two came in his throat. Edward Pillai had solved THE PROBLEM. Unfortunately, these moments of happiness, of having solved a problem, also didn't last too long. Very soon the feeling of being happy itself became a moment of deep frustration. It was almost as if he felt drawn to find the next problem - another maths equation, the secrets that lay behind the Big Bang, whether Shakespeare really did write all these plays or was it someone else.... All these thoughts conjured in his mind to create the next problem to be solved. The next moment of immense frustration that would consume him. These acts had their merits. By the time he was eighteen, he had already written a few blogs on Shakespearean plays, and had submitted a paper in The International Journal of Astrophysics on the composition of Black Holes. The paper didn't get published though, but it was appreciated by the editors and returned with a letter of gracious thanks.

Edward Pillai didn't top his class in Engineering, but he did score fairly well. The reason for not scoring the highest was his general interest in solving the hardest problems. In short, he never managed to finish his exam papers, since he attacked the most complex questions, and therefore when it came to scores, he was never on the top of the list. Yet, by the time he was twenty eight, he had filed his first patent and in the subsequent years, filed two more. He was hired by a product company where he diligently spent his hours trying his hand at predictive analytics. While his regular job didn't always add to his frustration or satisfaction, it was the special projects, the garage weeks, that consumed most of his attention. He did get a few projects off-ground, transformed one of them into an analytics product that would rake in decent money for his company. All in all, if one looked from the outside, Edward Pillai was all set to become a successful man.

Whatever it could look like from outside... the inside of a man is a different Universe altogether. Deep, impenetrable and mysterious in many ways. Edward Pillai had started getting frustrated by the time he was three years old. It had been a badly designed jigsaw puzzle that had triggered it. Twenty eight years later, layers and layers of frustration had built within him like a ticking time bomb waiting for somone to pull the switch, all set to liight up the world in flames. It bottled, and it bottled, and it bottled inside of him. The tiny moments of respite that came after solving a problem, now seemed too light for him to pay any attention to. The heightened hearing, the sense of smell, the beautiful breeze that roamed around inside his brain, the sounds of the birds and bees, the feeling of being content and worry-free, seemed trivial compared to the harder tasks.

On his thirty-second birthday, Edward Pillai's brand new Toyota Corolla hit several potholes on the way to the office and broke its bumper. He parked it on one side, walked out and calmly inspected the damages (Calm! Edward Pillai could not keep calm. If he showed calmness, that meant inside he was fuming). Not only did the bumper hang loose, there were several dents on two sides as well. The car had just got its first depreciation.

The Service Centre would have restored it and the Insurance company would have paid for the damages - but that didn't seem like a solution that appealed to Edward's sense of what constituted the right action. Getting insurance money to cover damages wasn't difficult but for society to prosper, cities needed decent roads. He decided to take on the Municipality. A battle that neither he nor anyone could ever win. He started by joining a petition on fixing the roads, he took casual leave to stand outside the Municipality office, he used his connections to fix up meetings with the highest officials, he identified the corrupt contractors who had constructed the roads and appealed to get them blacklisted. In a year, he wrote twenty three letters. These same letters piled up inside Municipality files and nothing happened. During an office-cleaning operation, three of these letters were warded off to a ragpicker and he made small paper bags out of them. Edward even got to meet the Urban Affairs Minister and lay down all his research along with a copy of all the letters he had written. The Urban Affairs Minister said that the Centre had been miserly while releasing funds, and they would look into it in due time. It didn't take him much time to forget about it.