Fascinating coincidences
Coincidences have always fascinated me. These are events or occurrences, the probability of which happening is close to zero. In mathematics, the fifth letter in the Greek alphabet, e, denotes this. It means infinitesimal. These have happened to me twice in the last 30 years, one of which happened last month on a flight. But let me start with the oldest one, which was in 1993.
My wife and I were going to Helsinki. Our two boys, aged 9 and 6, were with us. How they came to accompany me is a long story. Suffice it to say it was pure chance once again. But not a coincidence. Our connecting flight was from Frankfurt. We had two hours to kill and were sitting on some sofas and wondering how to kill time when a large white man came and sat down on an adjacent sofa. After a while, he started chatting with the boys and from his accent I could tell he was American. After a while he turned to my wife and started talking to her. She asked him where he was from. He said America. She asked him where in America. He said Tulsa, Oklahoma.
This hugely perked up my wife’s interest and she told him her brother also lived there. He said where exactly in Tulsa. So she took out her diary and read out the address. The man asked her the brother’s name. She told him. That’s when he nearly jumped out of his seat and started babbling. We were totally mystified. When we could eventually make out what he was saying it turned out that he was my brother-in-law’s next-door neighbour, living in the adjacent house! We have never stopped wondering about the probability of meeting him. Just think about it. What are the chances? That’s what a coincidence is.
It was another 31 years almost to the date that the second coincidence happened. By now our older son was living in Switzerland and we were going to visit on my grandson’s birthday. On the flight I watched two famous movies — The Last Rifleman and The Great Escape. And guess what? They turned out to be almost identical. The lead actors were different, of course, but superstars. The stories, however, were nearly exactly the same. It was extraordinary how they matched each other. Now what are the chances of being on a flight on which you watch two near identical films with a superstar in each? If you can calculate the odds, please do let me know.
Obviously, there are many other and much bigger coincidences. I googled to check and came across dozens. My favourite is about a woman called Violet Jessop. She was an employee on three ships that not only sank when she was on board but survived each time. Not just that: all three ships were owned by the same company. And one of them was the Titanic!
Another bizarre coincidence is that three of the first five American presidents died in July, and two of them on the same July 4, which also happens to be the American Independence Day. And so on. There are many coincidences in history that are simply inexplicable. In the end, it all boils down to chance. How would you react if you were told that you and your fiancé had been born on the same bed? Impossible? Not really. It has happened once.
But the one that wins hands down is the man who survived two atomic bombs. By an extraordinary chance he happened to be in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs fell. The Japanese government has authenticated this, says a post on Google. He lived to the ripe old age of 93 and died in 2010. Clearly, as the couplet by Sant Kabir says, Jako rakhe saiyyan, maar sake na koi. He who has God’s protection can’t be killed by anyone. Just like the lady who survived three ships which sank!
