Coincidences – Are they really? Or another force..

9.4.2010
Coincidences – Are they really? Or another force...

Just a few days ago I was watching a documentary on Independence of Vietnam, Ho Chih Min and the Vietnam War. 4 hours later, I was talking to my dear friend, Sasi, who told me that he had just returned from Ho Chih Min City! Here I was doing my own things and suddenly the word ‘Ho Chih Min’ get in the way twice in a row on the same day. Is that a coincidence or what?

A few years ago, I browsed a thin easy-to-read book on coincidences. Some of the facts that the author highlighted were beyond the imagination of an average man. To actually think out things and somehow correlate all the events were indeed recommendable. I reckon this how people come up with conspiracy theories. The famous example of coincidence is the one comparing events surrounding the lives of Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy. The other example is the number ‘8’ and events involving John Lennon.

When I was working in Labour Wards, my colleagues and I had an unwritten rule that Obstetrical event, (i.e. mishaps, complications, rare manifestations of a disease) usually happened in pairs or sometimes triple. The following examples may further illustrate this.
• In those days when ultrasound scanning of pregnancies was not frequently done and available as now, we had seen undiagnosed triplets twice two in a row;
• Nail biting like torrential bleeding in pregnancies with placenta previa and unenviable near miss experiences also usually happened in duplicates;
• Unavoidable maternal deaths happened in this manner as well.

Newspaper articles have repeatedly reported of a succession of earthquakes (e.g. Haiti - Chile, kidnappings (e.g. Abu Sayaff, Philippines, – Al Qaeda, Afghanistan) and other maladies. If one were to scrutinize these events, it would be crystal clear that this double jeopardy followed this said pattern. Is it a mere coincidence or is a tiny spectre of events which comprise the butterfly effect of the chaos theory?

Some more examples…
• In the 1930s, the Fred Astaire-Ginger Roberts dancing couple were quite a hot item in Hollywood as a reporter wrote...

‘”…while Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel writes "The nostalgia surrounding Rogers-Astaire

tends to bleach out other partners." … (Excerpt from Wikipedia)
A curious coincidence between this couple and my wife and I is our birthdates - Astaire 10th May, Roberts 16th July vs. Asokan 16th July, Shobha 10th May!
• In my family, there is a scary coincidence of birth dates. My sister in law, Anjali’s birth date is the same as mine – 16th July; My sister in law missed by a day 15th July*; Lal’s (brother in law) and Lat’s (sister) – 16th June; Shobha’s and niece Nisha’s – 10th May; Danny and Pushpa’s (my good friend) – 28th March; Yagan and Natasha (niece) – 5th May; my mother in law* and Karen (sister in law’s husband) – 1st January; Keshav and Lal’s ex-secretary 13th November; Divya and Sumi (my friend) and Nisha (a friend's daughter) 15th February; Amma's birthday and Yagan-Neelu wedding anniversary 27th December; Tania and Rajes-Parames-Appa's one pair of two pairs of twin siblings 23th May ; (*authenticity of dates are questionable!)

• Also in my family, the 2 boys born to my mother (my elder stillborn and I) were born on 9th July and 16th July respectively whilst my 2 sisters were born on 9th June and 16th June!

Another point to ponder is why my house number is 25 (2+5=7), in road 2E (2+5th alphabet=7) and I was born 0n 16 (1+6=7); and why I grew in Block E of RRF and now on road 2E?

They say the eyes do not see what the mind does not know or the eyes see what the mind wants to see. That reminds me of a scene from P. Ramlee’s comedy “Nujum Pak Belalang” where the psychic fools the royal audience by showing the location of the lost jewellery in the bowl of water. The royalties, including the king, who feared of being accused to be not intelligent, all agreed of seeing the image of the loot on the surface of the water, much to the amusement of P.Ramlee -the psychic- (whose son had heard the thieves' conversation earlier) and the audience of the movie!
In ‘X Files’, the truth was told to be out there. In the later series and movie sequels, we were told that the truth is too hot to handle and should be left as it is. If I am not wrong, the Quran also tells its followers that some things in the world are beyond the comprehension of our simple minds and are not to be questioned. Like in the immortalized words of Paul McCartney and the Beatles in a message to the world, Let it be…

The answers of all of the above must be somewhere in between…

Addendum: As an afterthought. there is another creepy example of coincidence. Raja-Jaspal, living in 2F, got married in Penang on 22nd November 1990 on a rainy day just like Asokan-Shobha (SI-NI)!!