Keep Your Powder Dry: Have You Been Baader-Meinhoffed Lately?

Keep Your Powder Dry: Have You Been Baader-Meinhoffed Lately?

Have You Been Baader-Meinhoffed Lately?

It was a Sunday. Time again for the regular haircut. I picked up a book at random and headed for the friendly neighbourhood barbershop. The book was for killing time while one waited for the barber's call. Those sepia-tinted days of the barber expertly cajoling his decrepit radio to play the Cibaca Geet Mala (yes, Binaca did morph into Cibaca before dying out) were long gone. The black and white 14" TV, strategically perched on a wooden stand in a corner, was spewing out a decade old C grade bollywood film. It was a good idea to carry a book. The choice of the book was random because it didn't even have a cover. One of those cover ripped off copies, possibly picked up from the pavement in Abids, on another long-gone Sunday. The title on the spine read 'The Man Who Tasted Shapes'. Well, ok......was this a book on the fine art of dining? Or was it about geometry? Or about weird career choices? (After all, there are tea tasters and wine tasters in this world, right? So, why not a shape taster?) I hadn't the foggiest of idea. Well, it turned out that the book was on Synaesthesia (as per the Wikipedia, the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body). 

The Cover That I Don't Have

Not something I'd read normally in my line of work. And certainly not something I would choose to read. But here I was at the barbershop, and the wait list promised a couple of hours of uninterrupted reading. So, I soldiered on. And reached the part containing an account of the extraordinary Mr Phineas Gage. This American railroad construction foreman (how apt! Are you Broad, Metre or Narrow, Mr Gage?) survived  an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe and the injury affected his personality and behaviour so profoundly that friends saw him as "no longer Gage".

Phineas Gage, holding the iron rod that pierced through his brain

Just then the Sunday newspapers arrived. I put the book aside and opened the magazine section of one of the newspapers. 'Synaesthesia', screamed the headlines of the full page lead article. And went on retell the story of the redoubtable Mr Phineas Gage. Two accounts of the same unlikely subject and even more unlikely incident, within ten minutes of each other? About something I'd never heard of in my life before? This was surely more than mere coincidence. And then the barber called and Mr Gage was soon forgotten.

Memories of an even more distant era. It was the Happy Hour on a Friday evening at the Wellington Gymkhana bar. I was narrating the most original reason given by a friend in far away Manipur for quitting smoking. Wife's badgering? Doctor's advice? Daughter's threats? "Naah, it's interfering with my drinking, yaar", the friend had said. I'd just delivered this punch line when somebody tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around. Who else could it be but my friend from Manipur, someone who would have no ostensible reason to be deep down south, in the Nilgiris! Eerie, I tell you! Carl Jung apparently termed it 'Synchronicity', to describe 'temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.' Hmmm....I'd still call it eerie.

Cut to the present. A couple of weeks ago, a friend generously gifted 'Mossad', a fast-paced book on some of the important operations carried out by the Israeli intelligence service. One chapter dealt with a 'nuclear spy'. Mordechai Vanunu worked in the super secret nuclear establishment of Israel in the 1980s. He managed to spirit out photographs and classified information relating to the Israeli nuclear weapons programme and sold them to the Sunday Times of London. Mossad managed to 'honey trap' Vanunu and got him back to Israel to stand trial. 

Yesterday, I finished reading 'Mossad' halfway through my routine on the treadmill. I ran to the study, picked up the first book I could lay my hands on and ran back to the gym to complete the hour and a half 'walk-n-read' regimen. 'The Heat and Dust project - the broke couple's guide to भारत' is a book about discovering India on a shoestring budget.

It's an exhilarating read, with liquid prose that goes down like a fine single malt. Sample this - 'The winter light is pale when it falls on fields in the distance. From high up, the views are spectacular. The hills again. Browns changing to blues that merge with the horizon. On the other side, though, the edges of the western sky are now curling into a crushed pink dust'. Or this - 'The dimpled lake quivers for a while, each ripple catching a shard of the smashed-up sun'. The book, thus far, speaks of Bikaner House in New Delhi, Jaipur, Pushkar and Jodhpur - names places with particular resonance in my current avatar. Nothing to do with Israel, nor with Mossad, least of all with 'nuclear spies'. But, come page 68 and Mordechai Vanunu makes his entry, in casual conversation between two virtual strangers in Jodhpur. Mention of Mordechai Vanunu? Halfway up a hill in Jodhpur? Two references in two widely different sources in one week? I'd be damned. I was sure this was something beyond a coincidence. It must have a name, an explanation. I resolved to delve deeper. But, in a while. First, I had to finish reading this article about the West German terrorist group that wreaked havoc in the latter part of the last century - Baader Meinhof. The release of its leaders from prison was one of the demands made by the Palestinian terrorists who held nine Israeli athletes hostage in the Olympic Games village in Munch in 1972.
Tonight, I got around to reading about this uncanny phenomenon of unlikely coincidences. And found that it actually has a name - Baader Meinhof!! Are you kidding me?