e-firsts

It was during one of the college tours that I found myself in middle of an intriguing experience. Once we had got down from the bus, I thought of first getting a top-up recharge for my cell-phone and ventured out in the nearby market. Even though I had never been to this city, Varanasi, but some of the roads, buildings and shops seemed so familiar that for a moment it seemed like a dream. It was almost unbelievable for a moment that I was roaming around the markets and streets as if I was born there! But the shock was yet to come. In search of a top-up shop, I approached a small-shop at the corner of the street. The shop was a typical kirana-cum-paan shop with items stacked over one another and thought it seemed like a complete mess but none of the items actually spilled over. Since it was morning, the owner was still offering prayers to the deities. He seemed around fifty years of age, grey hair, tilak on forehead and dressed in a saffron dhoti-kurta with a very serene appearance. To keep myself occupied, I started browsing through the various types of rudraksha which were on display.

As his prayers got over, he turned around and to my utter dis-belief; he called my name and asked me how I was! I can not describe what had struck me at that moment. I was completely nonplussed. But what was about to come was even more shocking. I not only replied to him but also referred to him as ‘Shankar Trivedi’ and he just nodded with a gentle smile on his face. All of it seemed like, I had already experienced it earlier (in a dream or otherwise). However baffled I was, with the events of last 1 minute, I got the cell-phone recharged and went straight to the hotel. The rest of the tour went as usual and we returned back after paying a visit to Kashi Vishwanath temple.

I had never been to the city before, forget about going to this shop and forget about meeting this person before. But somehow, I felt that I was revisiting a familiar place! Once I got back home, I googled for possible meanings of such experiences and learnt about ‘Deja-Vu’ experiences for the first time. I don’t know whether this experience exactly qualifies as a déjà-vu or not but I could not think of any other rational explanation.

I also learnt that nearly one-third of us go through such experiences, some of them on a regular basis while some infrequently. As per Wikipedia, the most likely explanation of déjà vu is not that it is an act of "precognition" or "prophecy", but rather that it is an anomaly of memory, giving the false impression that an experience is "being recalled". Also, one of the psychologists, Arthur Funkhouser, defines three types of déjà vu to more clearly differentiate between different neurological experiences. These are déjà vecu (already experienced), déjà senti (already felt) and déjà visité (already visited). Not going into many technicalities, I can just say some of the experiences are just strange. Aren’t they?