05 November 2013, 07:45 AM IST
There is a very old bridge, east of the crumbling industrial city of Kanpur, as you cross the meandering, listless Ganga. With more than a hundred superfast trains, including three Rajdhanis andf two Shatabdis that cross it every day, the number of one-, two-, and five-rupee coins that are dropped in the river are plenty. There are various squads of young boys that fish these out before the next rumble on the track above. The value of such collections per day must be close to the value of two grams of gold. The city of Unnao, the place of the present excavation for gold, lies exactly twenty kilometres once you cross the bridge. Unnao retains its prime status for hosting one of the largest tanneries in the country, and the business of leather finishing is such that Bollywood often reaches there for financial loans for some of its mega-budget extravaganzas.
No wonder the revered sadhu had a dream in such a scenario. With due reverence, one does not know where exactly the enlightening super-thought came from. We knew the rupee was sinking, it was known that gold had to be sold to prop up the slumping rupee, and the stock market was sagging like the centre of the cable of a suspension bridge. The first indication of the deteriorating state of the economy came from the diver boys that collections were falling by the day, nay, by each passing train. This gave nightmares to quite a few. But a mind unblended in indulgence has more positive foresights.
Think of a place, where a very rich king, a very just king, gave away his life for the lives and freedom of his own people. That was martyr land, every gravel of which was rich, and there was a certain reasoning that would conclude that further and ultimate wealth lay beneath. So compelling was the prophecy that scientific protocols, previous archaeological surveys and information with the geological survey, were to recede, and give way to fervent pleas to the administration, right till the top of the administration, that which was not done, may once be allowed to be done, for it was a matter of 400 tons of gold. It was an interrupted dream. In its full run the amount could be 10 times over.
This is a land to dream big, snooze day time, and snore the sleep out of the neighbourhood.
Seismological machines do not have much of a say in such matters, just as computers may rather shut their circuits while one is counting black money. However, to their admirable compliance, they gave reports of some metal objects lying beneath. These could be worn-off horse shoes after a battle, a khukri, a scabbard, or rusted parts of plough instruments. If metals were a plenty, could gold be far? Yes, so far no sign, but one can always say, as one of the police DIGs said, that DIGging was not sufficient, just as a confession could not be elicited, as third degree was not allowed to be used sufficiently, Mi Lord!
With such crescendo thinking, a failure is not a matter of unconcealed embarrassment. It is not a moment when memos are passed that such stupidity not be repeated henceforth. It is actually an uncelebrated moment of sheer bad luck, for, what if we had found even one fourth of it! Okay, you can say that after you have gulped down two quarters of your "desi".
The theory of dreams, and their ability to predict has yet to take its wobbly shape. Freud worked on it to find clues to the subconscious, but failed. One of his hypotheses was that they reveal concealed desires, triggered by observed phenomena during wakefulness. For instance, if you see too many horses during daytime, chances are that you will have nightmares. If you heard something from a rare horse's mouth, possibilities are you might wake up from a dream that, that particular ear of yours is chewed off. Actually, it may not happen that symmetrically, but these are examples for a simpler understanding.
Still one cannot deny the existence of communities which are gifted with the supernatural powers of having a prophetic dream at will. Middle-aged Punjabi women is one such recognized group. Choose, at random, someone from Lajpatnagar. The moment it is disclosed to that someone that a distant cousin staying next door was hospitalized in the night for a heart attack, no time is wasted in saying that for the last three nights she has been having such dreams, but was scared to reveal it to anyone. Unfortunately, there is no place in medical history to put down such third-person accounts. The predictive value of such true positive dreams, therefore, remains uncertain. I am sure there are an equal number of false positive dreams, but these are never mentioned.
Going by statistics as to the number of "hits" required to hit oil, or a precious metal, the probability depends on whether you are in an area where such minerals have been regularly tapped. Even here, it would be still less than 1:100 to have the quantity to make the project viable. Red Adair the famous oil explorer had a success record of 1:3, with or without tapping phones of Texaco, Mobil etc.
Compounding the ratio of successful dreams, and successful tapping, the probability was always close to having Martians on Mars, and yet there was a go-ahead. Astrologically if you see, the sensex has upped 700-800 points ever since the excavation was taken up. Probably markets got an amount close to the gold promised. Astrological conversion of results and reasoning is quite different even from quantum physics.
Dream ruling "sarkars" are bound to stay. The next round of excavations could be from the north courtyard, and then perhaps the south. You know quite well the uncertainties of the K-G basin blocks!
It's a new year, but is it really? I was reminded of the famous song in Muzaffar Ali's "Umrao Jaan".
"Is anjuman mein aapko aana hai baar baar …"
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