Random Ramblings of a Reluctant Blogger

How long a time frame is  acceptable to prove a hypothesis? Can the experiment last for decades or even longer? Especially so when the experiment has been an accidental one.

I was forced to rethink the postulate when I came across a book left by a previous passenger on the seat pocket of a flight from Mumbai a week ago. One look at the book  and I was surprised. For it was the very book I had in my possession once. It was a paperback edition of Henry Cecil’s ‘Full circle.’ I turned the pages and I saw what I was looking for _ the date and the place from where I had bought it five years back at an old bookstore in New Delhi, from where I was train-bound for Chennai. How it  got there I do not know, but it reminded me about an experiment I was once told about almost three decades back.

As many can recall, train journeys acquire a special charm when you have a  book on hand, more so if you are travelling alone. Rarely have I travelled without a book. 

(After one rather amusing incident, where I cachinnated with such force that I almost rolled off my upper berth, leaving my co-commuters baffled, I preferred to leave out P. G Wodehouse while travelling).

And one of the things I am wont to do when I buy a book is to write down the date and the place where I purchased it. I was thus jotting it down on a book I had just bought at the station, when my co-traveller noticed it. “Why are you doing it,” he asked and as I tried to explain why, I realised he was not expecting an answer, but was more keen to tell me about his “Huge experiment.”

“I am a medical representative and I spend almost 20 days in a month travelling. And have bought scores of books. Some or pretty much a lot of them are pirated, as it is easy on my pocket and I do not feel sad losing them, at least till I have finished reading it. It so happened that once I had lost a book on a journey and a month or so later I found it on a train on a  completely different route.”

What prompted him to do a “huge experiment” was that he found his books on a few more occasions. “That gave me an idea and ever since I scribble on the book, that whoever finds it please add the date and the place and leave it on the train for it to travel.” To add to it, he said, only once had he, since then, found his book back that too after a gap of five years!. That one had travelled to Katra, Solapur,  Goa, Jalandhar and even Jhumritalya and he was reunited with it in Jaipur. Once he mentioned Jhumritalya I suspected he was making up the whole thing.

And, even if I had to believe it, the experiment  sounded far-fetched. Firstly a book lover is very possessive of his book and perchance he does forget, what are the guarantees that the next person too loves to read. And if he does, won’t he take it back with him?. What happens to the book with no takers, once the train reaches the yard? Where does it go from there? to an old book store or in just some garbage heap? There were far too many uncontrollables for it to be even thought of as an experiment. And what was it that he was trying to prove?

I had all but forgotten the three-decades old conversation when this book of mine turned up. Wouldn’t he have loved to hear that the “great experiment” now encompassed a plane journey too!

But truth to be told, I was not planning on any experiment and this book might have slipped out as I was getting down. But I have a feeling what I had scribbled in it, apart from the date and place of purchase, could have sent it on a grand journey.

Not sure why, but I had written जब आना ही था, तो  गये  ही क्योँ  (If you had to come back why did you even leave?)

And as the plane was beginning to touch down I could not help but take another chance. I scribbled  जो जाते ही नहीं तो आते कैसे, (Had I not left, how could have I returned) and left the book there. Let’s see  where and how far it travels.