Coincidences

Life is full of surprises

Sometime during my early college years my parents and I were driving somewhere out of town. I was in the backseat, staring out the window, thinking about a million different things - as you do when you’re in the backseat - and for some reason my thoughts drifted towards sports, then cricket, and then to the Indian cricketer Yuvraj Singh.

Mind you, the road we were on was straight and I couldn’t see any of the upcoming buildings until our car passed them by. So I’m thinking about this, that, cricket, etc, and just as the name Yuvraj Singh crosses my mind, the very next moment we happen to pass by a hotel called Yuvraj.

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I had limited baggage space when I was packing to move to the United States for grad school. So I couldn't carry very many books, but I decided to take The Perks of Being a Wallflower as my one book with me, because it’s very thin and I really like it.

So I packed, flew, landed. Literally within the first couple of hours of arriving in the US, I happened to sit next to some American guy at the airport while waiting for my connecting flight. And the guy then reached into his bag, and out of all the millions of books in the world, guess which one he took out to read? Yup. (I even spoke to him about it.)

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There's a chess hustler who hangs out in Times Square. I've been to New York twice and played with him both times, a few months apart. The second time, he told me that he remembered playing me before. So we chatted a bit, and he asked me my name, and I said it’s Siddhesh, and I asked him his name, and he said it’s Sid.

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When I flew to the US in 2021 I watched Good Will Hunting on the flight. I didn’t really tell anyone about it, because who really cares about what movies their friends watch in the air. Exactly a year later though, one of my best friends also flew to the US, and completely of her own volition, also watched the very same movie in her flight as well.

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On a late evening some day in 2020 I was in a Zoom meeting with a colleague from my team. Immediately after the meeting got over and my work for the day was done, I closed the Zoom window and opened lichess.org to play some online chess (which I’d gotten addicted to during the pandemic).

Lichess has more than 100,000+ players online at any given time. I got paired with another user, played a game (and lost, I think), only to discover that out of thousands of potential players, Lichess had paired me with none other the colleague I’d just had the meeting with.