Cause and effect: No sneezing matter !

Cause and effect: No sneezing matter

I am one of nature’s logical types. I have a strong belief that anything that happens has a cause, a reason , a logic behind it. And sometimes it is funny.

As a part of my MBA I had to do a summer internship in a different city. I was staying in a hostel which was  a very old bungalow. It had a number of rooms, large and small and a huge drawing room. The doors were at least 7 feet high. It was a typical colonial/ Raj era bungalow, some of which still survive with the railways and the army.

 I shared my room with another MBA student from  a local school. Since he was a local , he had many friends and would return very late at night and go straight to bed. Now in those days there were no mosquito coils and repellants. Each bed was provided with a mosquito net.

After a few days, I noticed a peculiar routine with my room mate, Ramesh. He would come late, quickly change into night clothes and go to bed. The bed would creak a bit as he got in and lay down. After about a minute he would sneeze twice and then go off to sleep. This was an unfailing routine. Always 2 sneezes, not one or three. Always a minute or so after he got into bed. Needless to say, it was very intriguing.

So one weekend I set about trying to solve this mystery of the double sneeze and it did not take long. The mosquito net over Ramesh’s bed had acquired a lot of dust. As he got into bed , the bed got a little jolted and some of this fine dust rained down on Ramesh. This dust spray caused him to sneeze. Once he was already in bed no more jolting , no more dust spray and no more sneezing. That in any case was my deduction.

Now how does one confirm a deduction ? I this case I did it by the inverse route. I took out the mosquito net and dusted it thoroughly and I put it back. That night Ramesh came late as usual and immediately went to bed. But no sneezing !! Not even one. Voila !!

And the same thing happened on subsequent nights… no sneezing !! So after a week of the no-sneeze period I asked Ramesh if he had noticed that he had stopped sneezing. He had not noticed but when I asked him he agreed that he had indeed stopped. I then explained the cause-effect scenario to him.