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CRANK'S CORNER

        I am superstitious about super stitions. Touch wood, they al ways evoke the best laughter. For proof: Think yellow towel.

        Psychologists say that superstitions and sentiments come into play when one is not sure of oneself. It is no coincidence that cricket, films, politics - all avocations in which the secret of success can just be that, a secret, that is - see the most number of superstitions and quaint practices. That is why you have an anaconda-like creature slithering in a Rajnikanth movie even though the film's story may have as much connection with a snake as snowfall has with Chennai.

        Superstitions are interesting human foibles and fetishes, adding an agreeable comic aside to the humdrum of our lives. But when you wear your superstitious beliefs on your sleeve like, er, a colourful towel, there is no point in denying it or trying to intellectualise it. It will only add to the unintended mirth.

        My good friend Shivshankar never had any intellectual or rational pretensions. He was always at ease. And was always himself. He had strange habits. And stranger reasoning for them. For whatever reason, he used to twist his fingers tightly upon seeing a postal mail van whose number seemed to be more in our school days. On a particularly heavy day of mail traffic, he had to urgently fall back on his toes too to live up to his sentiments. I once asked him what would happen if you don't knot your fingers. Who knows, he said, but I dare not do it.

        Anyway, the upshot of all this was that Shivshankar used to sport fingers and toes that looked so crooked and twisted that many thought he was suffering from terminal leprosy at a very young age.

        Till this day, nobody knows how he picked up that queer habit. The queerer thing is he still persists with that, and his two sons, with whom he lives in America, also practise that.

        Talk of family values!

        Shivshankar was also always clad in dresses that looked too tight for his comfort. But that was a result of his sticking to shirts and trousers that were bought several years ago. He was persisting with them all just because they had brought him some luck on some occasion or the other.

        But to see him write his twelfth standard exams fitted in a dress that he wore for his tenth standard public exams was suffocating — for us, that is. Though it looked as if it would squeeze out his reproductive organs, Shivshankar hardly broke a sweat and even now feels that the particular outfit brought him all the luck needed to score marks to get into an engineering college.

        Fortunately, that dress gave up, tearing at the seams, unable to stand Shivshankar's bodily pressures. Otherwise, we would have had the mortification of seeing him take up GRE and TOEFL exams in those very same shorts and shirt.

        With that dress, I would have got into one of those Ivy League colleges, Shivshankar wistfully said later. But I don't think you could have even got into that dress, another friend said dryly.

        Most of the superstitions start as innocuous habits. But soon become unshakable shibboleths of our lives. It did for our mathematics professor. He prefixed every sentence with a misplaced 'of course'. First it was a simple affliction. But in due course, it quickly degenerated into an all-consuming cancer as he began to of-course even his name. He then of coursed his questions. Then, he of coursed of course. And finally, he came to such a stage that he began to of course every word.

        His tombstone would perhaps read, 'of course, he was a man of numbers. But no man knew his number of course.'

        RIP, of course.

        The spell of superstitions is such that it can take people to the extremes.

        'What the sea wants, the sea will have,' was a traditional superstition of the British Isles and many maritime cultures. Thus fatalistic sailors of the past—and some of the present—never learned to swim. And it is also believed that a sailor wearing an earring cannot drown. Alas, many sailors must have drowned by the sheer weight of their ear studs.

        A lover's superstition states that if a woman sees a robin flying overhead on Valentine's Day, she will marry a sailor. If she sees a sparrow, she will marry a poor man and be very happy. If she sees a goldfinch, she will marry a millionaire. Perhaps, if she sees nothing, she will not marry, and remain happy forever. But the lore of superstition is silent on that.

        I want to end this article with a smart punchline on superstition. But I can't. So I merely mop my sweaty forehead with a towel, which coincidentally is yellow, which, again coincidentally, is something I carry around daily for no apparent reason.