Our Ouija Board game.

Just when the massive amount of economics literature I've been devouring lately was beginning to bear off my sense of youth, my sister asked, "Da, do you still believe in planchette?". My response was a sweeping "No!" but I immediately realized I had nothing to add to that. Just the way an earnest believer would say "Yes" when asked if she believed in god.

Cricket and board games made up almost all my playing life in school. Just like everyone else I knew at that time, me, my sister and our group of friends in the building played Carrom, Snakes & Ladders, Lotto, really, really lame Chess and when the power went off - which, incidentally, made us all so happy we screamed ( we also screamed when it came back ) - we would retreat into a dark corner of someone's house ( randomly chosen, ofcourse ), light a candle very businesslike and pull out a notebook which we knew contained the Ouija board. Pin drop silence followed the planchette prayer and for some of us the excitement rose so high we had to scurry to the bathroom to relieve a bit of the extra-excitement and scamper back, just so we didn't miss the spirit. We were advised to invoke spirits of people we knew and to ask easy questions lest we upset their egos. My favorite spirits to invoke were Mahatma Gandhi and my grandfather. And I had two favorite questions : "When did India become free?" to Mahatma Gandhi and "What is my name?" to grandpa. Self-assurance, it seemed, was all I needed back then. Much to everyone's amusement, the planchette moved to 1, 9, 4, 7 and S, U, J, I when I was the medium and then gasping and satisfied, we would say the closing planchette prayers and request the spirit to leave the board and room.

So when my sister asked if I still believed in planchette ( which is what we called the Ouija board game ) a torrent of memories came rushing. What stumped me was I knew the planchette moved not as a "motor-reflex action to one's sub-conscious thoughts" as one of the popular explanations go, but in a very real, physical and intelligible sense. There seems no plausible answer and so I content myself by reckoning that in the "reasonable" world where even unreasonableness has reasons ( as new theories on behavioral economics explain ), a smack of such an enigma is very grounding indeed. And that, I believe, is definitely a fair reason to be content about.