The thrill of seeing your name in print is comparable to the adrenalin rush from any adventure sports. I was ecstatic on the day when my name had appeared in Mindsport by Mukul Sharma. And as you add layers to your ego, a side effect of ageing, you feel an urge to relive your wins, notwithstanding the scale. Hence I have spent two Sunday afternoons trying to find the proof of that but success has been elusive!
Mindsport was a weekly column in Sunday Times in the ‘90s which had interesting puzzles from diverse domains like literature, mathematics, logic, chess etc. Chess, by the way, was the underlying concept of the column which had a heading of e4 in bold on top, signifying the first puzzle and Endgame as the last puzzle. MS never claimed that these were his original creations and in fact the Endgame puzzles were generally contributions from readers. It was from these columns that I learnt about science magazines like Nature and Scientific American that the geek world devours. Besides the puzzles, the column used to have interesting trivia. Sample this: there is no english word that rhymes with the word month or there is no verb starting with q whose second letter is not u. Or Benazir Bhutto’s name has all the vowels in it and so does Mozambique!
True to MS’ style, my initials had appeared as one of the puzzle solvers. Given the similarity, it could have been my name or Bhaiya’s, as we both go by the moniker - BKumar from Bhagalpur. I remember having kept a cutting of that column and revisiting the yellowed strip as recently as last year.
Mindsport puzzles were definitely neither elementary nor weekend staple and the way people would proudly pronounce their alums before explaining their solutions, the chances were bleak that it was my name. However, I was completely overtaken by the thought of finding that treasure trove. Quite unlike romantic flicks though, I couldn’t find it in my collection or books and places where I would generally keep such tit bits!
The search had now turned into a rage and I thought of trying my luck on the internet. In this connected world where people have archived anything that was ever printed or otherwise, I was confident of finding it. And find I did, the URL that has almost all the columns of mindsport, mukulsharma.org.in. Besides, I found hordes of info about Mukul Sharma and how Mindsport was conceived when Pritish Nandy and MS agreed to have a weekly column for the nerds. I also found that MS had stopped the column abruptly after the number of hate mails from smart alecks, on the quality of puzzles, almost pushed him to depression. More interestingly how Mukul Sharma is the Sharma in SenSharma (Konkana SenSharma is his daughter).
Even on the website, however, I didn’t find the column that I was desperately looking for. May be the few missing ones on the website were the culprit. As I was losing hope I thought of searching the other puzzle which I remember (this is called Buffon’s needle problem) -
Suppose we have a floor made of parallel strips of wood, each the same width, and we drop a needle onto the floor. What is the probability that the needle will lie across a line between two strips?
I distinctly remember this puzzle since a school friend had solved it and his solution along with his initials (TF) were also printed. I searched the website for this too but didn’t find it. At this point I started questioning my memory and my reality distortion trait.
It so happens, and let me categorically state it that it is very infrequent, that if I try recollecting some story which a friend had narrated, I tend to replace myself as the protagonist. So was this one of those disruptive psychological narrative and my name was never printed in Mindsport! Till I find that yellowed paper cutting, I will continue questioning the authenticity of my memoir - was it TF or me or neither?
