Bhalku Ram is not a well-known historical figure in India despite the fact that the Kalka-Shimla railway line has been given a heritage status by UNESCO and that almost over a century after the track was built a railway museum known as Baba Bhalku Rail Museum was opened in July 2011 near the Shimla Old Bus Stand.

Part of the reason why Bhalku is not known is that he was uneducated, poor, and from a very remote part of upper Shimla that lies ignored even in the small state of Himachal Pradesh and so is not even a speck in world geography. The literature available on him is very scant since he himself could not have left any written records of his amazing feats; and more importantly on the incredibly-fascinating fact of how he reached the conclusions that he reached, from where major decisions were made by British engineers. Bhalku’s crucial work was between June 1898, when the contract to build the Shimla-Kalka railway line was signed, and November 1903, when it was completed with 889 bridges and 103 tunnels.

Before I come to Bhalku’s achievements, sample this strikingly-parallel story documented by Malcolm Gladwell: In the mid-nineteenth century, work began on a crucial section of the railway line connecting Boston to the Hudson River. The addition would run from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy, New York, and it required tunnelling through Hoosac Mountain, a massive impediment, nearly five miles thick, that blocked passage between the Deerfield Valley and a tributary of the Hudson.

James Hayward, one of New England’s leading railroad engineers, estimated that penetrating the Hoosac would cost, at most, a very manageable two million dollars. The president of Amherst College, an accomplished geologist, said that the mountain was composed of soft rock and that tunnelling would be fairly easy once the engineers had breached the surface. “The Hoosac . . . is believed to be the only barrier between Boston and the Pacific,” the project’s promoter, Alvah Crocker, declared.

Everyone was wrong. Digging through the Hoosac turned out to be a nightmare. The project cost more than ten times the budgeted estimate. If the people involved had known the true nature of the challenges they faced, they would never have funded the Troy-Greenfield railroad. But, had they not, the factories of north-western Massachusetts wouldn’t have been able to ship their goods so easily to the expanding West, the cost of freight would have remained stubbornly high, and the state of Massachusetts would have been immeasurably poorer. So is ignorance an impediment to progress or a precondition for it?

The economist Albert O. Hirschman loved paradoxes like this. He was a “planner,” the kind of economist who conceives of grand infrastructure projects and bold schemes. But his eye was drawn to the many ways in which plans did not turn out the way they were supposed to—to unintended consequences and perverse outcomes and the puzzling fact that the shortest line between two points is often a dead end.

“We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,” Hirschman wrote: “Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.”

The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.

That’s exactly what happened to the British while building the Shimla-Kalka railway, with the only difference being that the challenge was far more insurmountable. The longest tunnel in this journey that cuts through God knows how many mountains is the Barog tunnel. It is named after British engineer Colonel Barog, under whose supervision the digging of the tunnel started. The digging was being done from both sides and the engineers discovered mid-way that a proper alignment to the tunnel could not be found. The British government fined Barog (Just Rupee 1) with accusations of wasting the property of the government. Colonel Barog felt humiliated and out of frustration and depression committed suicide. He was buried near the incomplete tunnel. The work was then assigned to Chief Engineer HS Harrington. Harrington and his team with all their instruments struggled to find a solution to the same hurdle of alignment.

There is no documentation available on whether Harrington and his team found Baba Bhalku or vice versa. What is known is that Bhalku joined Harrington’s team and soon became the most important man in it. His only instrument was a long and solid wooden staff with which he would hit a section of the mountain wall inside the tunnel and listen to the sound. He repeated the exercise on various points inside the tunnel and then filtered the information based on the sound. When he found something, which he invariable did, he would instruct the engineers to dig from the point he’d zeroed upon. And they followed him. To cut the long story short, the alignment to the Barog tunnel was found and what could not be achieved with a reasonable explanation was achieved by something that was extremely reasonable but completely unexplainable.

The wooden staff of Bhalku was then employed in most of the remaining tunnels as it saved time and rigorous analysis that mostly led nowhere as opposed to pure intuition (Modern science defines it as snap judgment) that was, well, foolproof. Bhalku was the reason why this arduous and ambitious project was completed in record time and has stood the test of time. The British Government honoured Bhalku Ram by presenting him a medal and a turban.

What was Bhalku doing? He knew something but he did not know what and how; he reached perfect conclusions but even if he could he could not have explained how he reached them. The part of our brain that leaps to conclusions like this is called the adaptive unconscious, and the study of this kind of decision-making is one of the most important new fields in psychology. “The adaptive unconscious is not to be confused with the unconscious described by Sigmund Freud, which was a dark and murky place filled with desires and memories and fantasies that were too disturbing for us to think about consciously.”

The adaptive unconscious is what enables human beings to make snap judgments; and there are numerous examples to show that organizations have sometimes taken over two years to reach some important conclusion by employing dozens of experts and failed only to have someone come in and take just 2 seconds to give them the right answer. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is a fascinating story of those 2 seconds.

Bhalku is also Baba Bhalku for the many people who worship him as a saint. He was a misfit, which is never a problem in small towns and in the mountains it is actually a virtue. The culture is still alive in the hills because there is no payoff for homogeneity and almost everybody is a character. The cities are dull because there is a massive payoff to be like everybody else (The minor consolation is that even this extreme corporatisation of our culture will fail in achieving this fully) …more on that perhaps in another post.

The problem with Bhalku was that he took goodness to the extreme. In his village he didn’t live in his house but some 50 metres downhill, in the same property, under a tree with some domestic animals. The most legendary anecdote of his goodness is that he used to grease his hair with a less-refined local form of honey. He did it because he felt that it was his moral responsibility to provide food to the lice that had found accommodation in his long matted hair. It’s easy to see why his family was not so accommodating towards him.