MY SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

Before you start to wonder what the heck does the title of this post signify; let me spare you the trouble of googling.”Six degrees of separation” is a concept that I came across in the internet a few months back and I was quite fascinated by it. Well what it states is “Anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.” To put it in more simpler terms, you name anybody in the whole wide world; we would connect to that person within a chain of 5 more people .The theory was actually formulated by some Hungarian and to prove this there was an experiment which was done in which, few individuals were selected randomly and they were asked to send a package to a complete stranger somewhere in the world . The senders were given the recipients name , occupation and general location. The senders were instructed to pass on the package to a person they knew on a first name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient. Long story short ;The experiment was successful it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered.

Well , its often said that nothing is fool proof for a sufficiently talented fool .I convinced(begged would be a more apt word) a few friends of mine to try this out. I selected the “target recipient” who is a native of Trivandrum (another friend of mine ) and also selected a few “random individuals “(also friends of mine, 3 in number ).Both the parties do not know each other and are complete strangers (perfect isint ?).Now the worst thing , to get a package which should be delivered to the target ; we bought 3 packs of “Cadbury Temptations “and gave all them the following info:-

1. Name of the target
2. Occupation
3. District

Now the senders were supposed to give this package to a person they knew pretty well who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally.Well, the process started and and all I can say after 2 months is “the process has ended” and we don’t know where the packages are(somebody somewhere must have eaten it I guess!).

Moral of the sory :-An idle mind is a devil’s workshop.