It’s what my friend’s young friend said: “Such a coincy-doincy, no?!” It took a few seconds for the paisa to drop. Of course, coincidence… coincy-doincy… same difference!
So often, you’re thinking of someone and that someone calls, or sometimes even lands up at your doorstep. I’ve caught myself saying so many times, “Oh I was just thinking about you”, or “I was just going to call you”. It happens more often than you think, in many more ways than you can imagine.
The early part of my childhood was spent in Ranchi (yes, Dhoni’s city-town!), in Bihar (now Jharkhand). Back then, it was known for the only institute of mental health in the country, and in certain other circles as the headquarters of Paramahansa Yogananda (remember, The Autobiography of a Yogi , and recently, the documentary film, Awakening ?). The surroundings were idyllic. Often, around twilight, we would hear the songs of the Santals wafting on the breeze. Every day was a simple loop of school (Loreto) and home (Doranda) and play, play, play.
The first coincy-doincy
The years went by, life happened, time and distance wove their colours into our experiences. We piled on the years, and a new person joined the publishing company in Chennai where I worked. And oh-my-goodness-what-a-coincy-doincy ! She went to school in Ranchi, the same school that I had been to! Not at the same time, but what were the odds!?!
The years went by and just by chance oh-my-goodness-what-a-coincy-doincy ! Her mother, who had grown up in Jamshedpur (and was about 20 years older than I), had studied dance from a teacher called Kelu Nair from Kerala. Now, this same Kelu Nair had been my dance teacher too, in a place called Durgapur, in West Bengal, where we had moved after Ranchi. He lived in Calcutta (still anglicised at the time), and came down to Durgapur on certain weekends to conduct classes. He stayed over at our home in Vishwakarma Nagar! And he had been my colleague’s mother’s dance teacher at another time, in another place. How weird is that!
The Madras connection
As a student, between finishing my postgraduate studies and looking for a job in journalism, I enrolled for a media course in Bombay, now Mumbai, and stayed at a women’s hostel near Bombay Central (station) called University Settlement where girls from all over the country doing courses in different institutions in the city boarded and lodged. It was an interesting, cosmopolitan population that headed out in various directions every morning, packed lunch in bag, eager to embrace the future. My first roomie was an Iranian woman, among the early crop of students who had been forced to leave their country by the Shah of Iran’s Savak secret police.
But soon, I moved to another room. Oh-my-goodness-what-a-coincy-doincy! My new roomie was the daughter of a person who had been warden of the hostel at Vidyodaya High School in Chennai, the same school my mother went to and was a hostelite! My roomie’s mum had been my mum’s warden for six years! I remembered all the stories she had told my sister and me about school, and ‘wardie’ and how much fun she had had. Small world.
When my son first went to the US, to study at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbour, I was all edgy, an anxious parent, eager to establish contacts with people there who would keep an eye on the ‘boy’, much to the latter’s embarrassment. We discovered that my cousin had a very good friend there, and I felt better. Turned out, my son’s roommate there had family friends going back to a time in Zambia, now living in Ann Arbor. Yes, it’s that coincy-doincy factor again: it was the same family that my cousin had put us in touch with. So, hungry students that they were, the two of them and the third roommate, marched off to the common friend’s home where they were given a scrumptious lunch and plenty more to take back. In between, Roomie 3 made his own special connection with the family, thanks to a common spiritual leader, and the coincidences-come-in-threes cycle was complete!
There are lots more stories: like the time I had taken my mother for lunch to her favourite restaurant, Ende Keralam , and there I noticed a mother-daughter couple like us at the next table. In a couple of days, when my mother and I boarded a British Airways flight to London, the mother-daughter from the restaurant were on the same flight! And in London, after catching up with a friend from my Durgapur days, on the way to the station to catch the tube back to my sister’s, we bumped into old friend from Chennai who was returning home on the same day, same flight as us!
How do we explain coincidences? There are theories galore — baffling, funny, curious and plain creepy. They go from the statistical to the supernatural. But I like to think of coincidence as something that spices up our lives, that extra something we can’t lay a finger on but which reminds us that life’s a sport.
Eye of the beholder
In an article in The Atlantic magazine (‘ Coincidences and the meaning of life ’), Julie Beck quotes David Spiegelhalter, the Winton professor of public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, as saying: “A coincidence itself is in the eye of the beholder… If a rare event happens in a forest and no one notices and no one cares, it’s not really a coincidence.”
But it’s happened, hasn’t it, even if you don’t know about it? Imagine how many coincy-doincys the world is spun with and we don’t even know. The amazing thing, says Spiegelhalter, “is not that these things occur, it’s that we notice them… This is my big theory about coincidences, that’s why they happen to certain kinds of people.”
And who are these certain kinds of people? According to some research, those with personality traits “linked to experiencing more coincidences (are) people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual, people who are self-referential (or likely to relate information from the external world back to themselves), and people who are high in meaning-seeking are all coincidence-prone. People are also likely to see coincidences when they are extremely sad, angry, or anxious.”
Maybe. What I do know is that observing, absorbing, making connections, and savouring life’s opportunities and experiences, makes the world a much more interesting place, and that’s what coincy-doincy’s all about. Relishing the moment.
After all, when you think about it, your very existence is a huge coincy-doincy, isn’t it? What if you had never been born on Planet Earth?