AMARI DIXIT - Author

When someone mentions coincidence in our day-to-day activities, we tend to remark on it with wonder and awe. In our mind, there seems to be only a small leap from coincidences to miracles. We say to ourselves, "This happened to me! There must be a divine hand in this," if you are religious. Sometimes you may even think, I wonder if this will mean something good for me. If you are not religious, then you might walk on with a smile on your face, and a sense of wonder in your heart whenever the incident crosses your mind. Until you forget about it.

 

However, when you mention coincidence in a work of fiction, every reader wants to turn tail and run. Readers are too smart to be fudged off with a neat coincidence the author has inserted to make life easy for them, e.g. to either:

• move the story along

• introduce disparate characters to the plot

• get rid of the villain

• get rid of the big, bad conflict at the end

 

So there is a paradox between fact and fiction. Coincidence is okay in life (which often is stranger than fiction) but not okay at all in fiction.

 

There is a paradox about how few people there need to be in a room before 2 share a birthday. You would think there would need to be at least half of 365. However, there needs to be only 23 people in a room before the odds are 50% that they share a birthday.

 

This was illustrated in my life a month or so back. A colleague at work, let's call him Brad, and I happened to find out we shared a birthday. This was a coincidence in itself, as I rarely share my birthday with anyone, and as I was freelancing I had not been working there long. Then Brad mentioned the above birthday paradox to me. I remarked (maybe pedantically in hindsight) that we were not in the same room; we worked in different locations for the same corporate company. Not much later, Brad attended a conference, and texted me that there was another person in the room of <30 people who shared our birthday! I was taken aback about this. What are the odds that if 2 people had to share a birthday, it was ours, when we had been ruminating on this paradox?! I enjoyed this piece of coincidence.

 

 Another time, I was travelling to another part of the world on a month-long holiday. On a teeming capital city street, I bumped into a compatriot. A remarkable coincidence, we said.