Triskadecaphobia and bollywood follies

Airlines don't have a 13th row of seating and hotels do not have a 13th floor. I suspect it is not triskadecaphobia but common business sense that dictates this decision. Whether or not the management of the airline or hotel cares about the number 13, customers might, and it would be a rather biggish loss of revenue if you had to keep an entire floor or row of seats vacant.

What possesses Bollywood personalities to add redundant letters to the spelling of their names? I present Suniel Shetty, Ritiesh Deshmukh, Viviek Oberoi as cases in point. There is a also a tendency to have movie names start with a certain character of the alphabet. I understand the letter K is very popular, followed by R or something. We did not have Amitabh Bachchan change the way his name is spelled. Nor Vinod Khanna, nor Rajesh Khanna. What is it in the water these days? Here's my theory.

Humans seem to have this need to assign cause to each effect. And if cause and effect is not visible then in desperation, correlation becomes sufficient. One can easily imagine how the Native American rain dances probably came to be. Big chief, worried about the lack of rain, perhaps stood with one foot stepped up on a rock and scratched his rain. And guess what, it rained the next day. A couple of years later, this did not suffice, he also had to tap his forehead before it rained. Pretty soon, we have an elaborate rain dance.

In Bollywood career spans are shortening.  Kumar Gaurav on the other hand was a one movie wonder. So was Rahul Roy. This possibly the stuff of nightmares for young actors with one hit under their belt. Follow a success with a flop and these actors likely look for cause and effect. Finding none within their skills or effort, they look to the stars for this cause and effect. Fortunately for them there are many wise men willing to help identify the occult cause and to provide a remedy for a fee.

Gullibility is a necessary but not sufficient condition to ignite superstition. Add societal pressure to gullibility and you have the spark. Popular media builds tremendous pressure on youth today to succeed by publishing mega success stories with regular frequency. We had one about Facebook's acquisition of Whatsapp for $19 Billion and Mark Zuckerberg's becoming the world's youngest billionaire. Some years ago it was Shabir Bhatia selling hotmail to Microsoft for $165 million. The 100,000 failed enterprises that exist for every mega success don't get written about and this discrepancy leads us to believe that everyone else in the world must be succeeding, and spectacularly so.