The Society Committee Vote

The summer holidays were over. The mangoes of Jugnupur had been eaten, the fireflies had been waved goodbye, and Bunny and Happy were back home in Bengaluru, on the twentieth floor of Silverline Heights in HSR Layout, Sector 1.

Bunny was thirteen now, and starting Class 8. Happy was nine, and just as full of schemes as ever. And this year, for the first time, someone else had come home with them: Mitthu. Dadi had said the old parrot needed “a little city education”, and Mitthu had agreed, on one condition. He would have the best spot on the balcony railing.

He had not expected the traffic. “Honk, honk, HONK!” he grumbled, glaring down at the jam on the main road. “In Jugnupur, the only thing that honks is a goose. And even the goose has manners.”

But at Silverline Heights, nobody was thinking about traffic. They were thinking about Sunday. Every Sunday morning, Block A played Block B at cricket on the society ground, and every Saturday night, the whole society argued about whether the match should happen at all.

That Saturday, the society committee met in the clubhouse. Prakash uncle, the secretary, opened his fat notebook. “The question,” he announced, “is Sunday’s match. Yes or no?”

Everyone answered at once.

“Look at those clouds!” said Jyoti aunty. “It will pour.”
“The weather app says only a small chance,” said Anjali didi from the fourth floor, without looking up from her phone.
“My knee is aching,” said Gowda thatha darkly. “My knee is never wrong.”
“It rained on Thursday, the ground is still soggy,” said Bharath anna, the security guard, who kept the key to the ground.
“Half of Block B has a maths test on Monday,” said somebody’s mother.

Prakash uncle looked at the ceiling fan as if it might help. “Every week, the same fight,” he sighed.

Happy jumped up. “Let Mitthu decide!”

Mitthu puffed out his chest. “Mango,” he said. Nobody was sure if that meant yes or no.

Then Bunny put up his hand. “Uncle,” he said, “everyone here is right about something. The clouds matter. The ground matters. The test matters. But they don’t all matter the same amount. What if every clue gets a vote, and the important clues get a bigger vote?”

That night, Bunny spread paper all over the living room floor. Helping him was Riya from Block B, the other team’s captain, who wrote computer programs for fun and carried a calculator everywhere, “just in case”.

They made five cards, one for each clue. Each clue got a score from 0 to 1: a clear sky was 1 and black clouds were 0, a dry ground was 1 and a swamp was 0, and so on.

Then they gave each clue a weight: a number saying how much that clue should count. The ground got the biggest weight, 4, because nobody can play on a swamp. The clear sky got 3. Enough players got 2. Exam week got minus 5, because a test pushes hard towards “no”. And Gowda thatha’s knee got minus 1.

“Only minus one?” said Riya, grinning. “He’ll be offended.”
“It’s a good knee,” said Bunny. “But it isn’t a weather satellite.”

Last came the rule. Multiply each clue by its weight, add everything up, and if the total is more than 5, the match is on.

Mitthu hopped up beside the big paper circle as if he had invented it. “So the circle listens to everyone,” he said slowly, “but it listens to some more than others.”

“Exactly,” said Bunny. “Like a panchayat where the wisest people get more say.”

Riya read out the numbers for this Saturday. The sky was mostly cloudy, so the sky clue was 0.2. The ground was half dry: 0.5. Gowda thatha’s knee was definitely aching: 1. No exam this week for Block A: 0. And there were plenty of players: 1.

“No match,” said Riya. She tried last Sunday’s numbers too, when the sky was blue and the ground bone-dry. “Nine. Play. That’s what really happened!”

Mitthu looked at the paper circle with new respect. “It’s like a very small, very fair brain,” he said.

The paper neuron was taped to the living room wall. Happy looked at it for a long time. He did not like the answer. He wanted to play.

So, late that night, when everyone was asleep, he tiptoed out with a big orange star. It was a brand-new clue, Happy really wants to play, and on the back he had given it a weight of +100. He stuck it on the wall and joined it to the circle with a piece of string.

Mitthu watched the whole thing from the top of the bookshelf.

In the morning, Bunny did the sum again, just to be sure. “103.6?” he said. “That’s impossible. The sky is black!” Then he saw the star. “HAPPY!”

“I only added one card,” said Happy.

“One card with a weight of a hundred,” said Riya, “beats every other clue put together. Now it would say ‘play’ even in a cyclone.”

Bunny took the star down. “If someone can secretly change the weights,” he said, “they can change every answer, and nobody would even know.” From that day on, the paper neuron was kept inside Prakash uncle’s notebook, and only the committee could change it, together.

On Sunday morning, Kabir chachu came over for breakfast. He lived in Bengaluru too, on the other side of the city, and he built AI for a living. Bunny showed him the paper neuron.

Chachu laughed out loud. “Bunny, you’ve built an artificial neuron! That is the little building block of every neural network, the kind of AI that recognises faces, understands speech and writes answers in chatbots.”

“Just one circle?” asked Bunny.

“Real neural networks have thousands, millions, even billions of them,” said chachu. “They are arranged in layers. Remember how a photo is really just numbers for tiny coloured squares? Give those numbers to the first layer. Each neuron there looks for something small, like an edge or a curve. The next layer combines those into shapes, like an eye or an ear. The next combines shapes into a face. Every neuron is doing exactly what yours does: multiply, add, decide.”

“But who chooses all those weights?” asked Riya. “We argued for an hour about just five.”

Chachu smiled. “Nobody chooses them by hand. The network learns them from examples. It guesses, checks how wrong it was, and nudges every weight a tiny bit. Again and again, millions of times.”

Prakash uncle, who had come to see the famous paper neuron, was listening from the door. He opened his notebook. “I have written down every Sunday for three years,” he said. “The weather, the ground, whether we played.”

Chachu’s eyes lit up. “Uncle, that notebook is training data.”

At ten o’clock, the sky opened. Rain drummed on the clubhouse roof and turned the cricket ground into a small lake.

But nobody was standing in it, soaked and grumpy, because the committee had already decided the night before. Instead, Silverline Heights had its first ever Rainy Sunday Carrom Championship. Happy lost every game and didn’t mind at all.

Prakash uncle shook Bunny’s hand. “First time in three years,” he said, “that we decided in ten minutes, and nobody fought.”

Gowda thatha tapped his knee. “Minus one,” he muttered. “We will discuss this.”

And on the window sill, Mitthu watched the rain, feeling very pleased with the city after all. “A very small, very fair brain,” he said to himself. “I should get one.”