The Tide of Fortune

I have always prided myself of being a rationalist to the core, and any mention of providence or fate or luck has always been anathema.

During our college days we played a game of cards, popularly called "Flush", it is a pure game of chance, with no claims to even an iota of skill, except an ability on the part of the player, to keep cool and reveal nothing by way of body language. A game very well suited, indeed, for hard core gambling. Off course our meagre resources, in those parsimonious times, did not permit us fancy stakes, so we played with small change.

I being a non-smoker had passed a diktat, that my room-mate shall not smoke in the room. He got back at me, by insisting that no gambling take place in our room. Off course there was no dearth of rooms in the hostel, where our game was always welcome. Some times the host would not play at all, but the sheer thrill of fortunes (if at all those meagre sums could be addressed thus!) being made and lost, was a treat, not to be missed.

My grounding in Mathematics had taught me, what the probabilities would be, of drawing various combinations for a hand of Three cards, so playing "blind", or asking for "show" or "quiting" were decisions not too difficult to make. My demeanour too, being of a somber type, my opponents, by watching me, could never glean the true strength of my hand. In short I was a fairly adept gambler.

Thankfully, as my grades dropped that semester, I quit "Flush" altogether. We shifted to the more brainy "Rubber Bridge".

One aspect of "Flush", though, has always haunted me. Probability had taught me that over a period of time, all players have the same chance of getting "good" or "bad" cards. Strangely my observations were contrary! If it is your day, you would go on getting good cards, and if it wasn't your day you would go on getting bad cards, game after game.And to beat it, on such bad days, even if you happened to get good cards, either your opponents would just quit, making the pile of winnings meagre, or someone would come up with a highly improbable set of better cards, not only taking away the winnings, but adding hurt to injury, as higher stakes were put on the table commensurate with the good hand.

I know a rationalist would dispute this by saying that the game has to go on for a sufficiently long time to get the "equalising" effect of probability. But the moot point is for how long?

In life too, I have observed, that more than any thing else, it is a fortuitous quirk of fate, which is the doing or undoing of one's destiny.

Shakespeare has called it a "tide". ("There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures".)

We all know how quirky tides are, this one too, is no exception, and to beat it, it never comes announced, any way how are we to know, that when it comes, it is the right one indeed.

Here comes destiny!