In a group of 23 people, the heading said, at least two have the same birthday. That is, the probability of finding a person who shares your date of birth is more than 1/2. I am no mathematics expert and I cannot vouch for that. But if you are a believer, you can check it out yourself. Despite my scepticism about all those birth-decides-fate 'sciences', there is one aspect that makes me curious -- do folks born the same day share anything special? They would have exactly the same pattern in life, if you go by the glossy booklets sold by the dozen on grocery store checkout counters; as a matter of fact most of them seem to suggest that every 12th person leads the same life, if I take the liberty to presume that Mother Nature ain't unfavourably biased towards any particular zodiac! Nah, I belong to the breed that glances at weekly forecasts on lazy weekends merely to soak in the warm, comfortable feeling you get from reading saccharine niceties. So I don't expect lives to sound like reruns of the same soap opera on different channels. What I do wonder is, is there any special bonding between people born the same day? Like: would I get along famously with someone who was born today, November 13? Will we share the dislike for mushrooms? I could never manage to get hold of someone to verify my doubts. I never had a classmate who distributed birthday sweets the same day as me. Without crosschecking with experts in mathematics, I guess the odds would be 1/365 of meeting such a person. Not too bad considering the chances of scratching your car in the parking lot are lower, and still everybody I know of has done that at least once, and some more often. Unfortunately, if you have a natural flair for forgetting names and faces, then your social circle never seems to beat such a decent probability. I might be better off finding my test cases over the public address system at the next Kumbh Mela. I surfed around to find luminaries who share my birthday. Basking in the illustrious company of the likes of R L Stevenson, I realised this exercise was self-defeating: An avid Juhi Chawla fan can hardly give all the credit for her success to her birthday ignoring the other charming facets of her personality. Or figure out if Law & Order star Chris Noth has a high opinion about me because I happen to share his birthday. Or whether I would have loved Whoopi's acting any lesser if she didn't belong to my b'day club. So even this attempt at an answer ended inconclusively, but I had at least one more thing to brag about. All these doubts were set to rest some time ago, and the answer was something I didn't quite like. I chanced upon the fact that one of my 'good' friends and I were born within a few hours of each other. Alas, my special birthday-bonding theory seems to have a grotesque corollary -- I had a terrific crush on her, while she couldn't care less... Maybe this was the exception that proves the rule. Less optimistic ones than me have since cited examples of squabbling twins as a strong antidote to my oh-so-clever fundas. Such setbacks notwithstanding, Shailesh Jain would still brave serpentine queues for any Juhi-starrer. Illustration: Lynette Menezes Tell us what you think of this diary Be part of an exciting venture! Write a Diary!
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