Six Degrees of Separation

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  1. My first cousin’s husband turned out to be my really good friend’s wife’s cousin.
  2. A lady I met at a friend’s place turned out to be my ex-manager’s wife.
  3. This same ex-manager turned out to be my current colleague’s volleyball team-mate.
  4. A good friend from Junior College turned out to be my Mom’s distant relation’s son.
  5. My roomate’s husband and a friend of both me and my roommate, turned out to be related.
  6. This friend’s wife turned out to be my friend’s relative.
  7. My ex-boss’ wife turned out to be my batchmate from our initial training days at work.
  8. My friend A’s wife turned out to be my friend B’s good friend.
  9. My friend from college and my work acquaintance met later, through an online matrimonial site!
  10. A competing team’s member in my husband’s cricket team turned out to be my old work project’s batchmate.


Don’t such realizations fascinate you? A reality show contestant turns out to be someone from your childhood playgroup? Your friend’s spouse turns out to be your spouse’s friend? Your colleague turns out to be your mother’s cousin’s son? How you run into completely unexpected people, at the most weirdest of times in the weirdest of places! Co-incidences? Think about it, I bet you could come up with 5-6 such “co-incidences” yourself. If you don’t, walk through your Facebook friend list and come tell me if you find more than 10% of them without mutual friends. I’m sure if I try modelling an “acquaintance tree” like a family tree, I’ll come up with many more such inter-relations.

Per Wiki, Six Degrees of Separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, “a friend of a friend” statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. Recent studies conducted on Twitter and Facebook put this figure at 5 and 4 respectively. When my friend from #5 in the list above told me about this “6 step” concept (and this was a while ago!), it intrigued me enough to read up more about it (better late than never!). Its a rapidly shrinking world with myriad tools like social networking sites, blogger networks, virtual classrooms and online activities bringing people around the world closer to each other than ever before. Facebook even has a app dedicated to this concept called ‘Six Degrees’ which calculates the links of separation between 2 people. One can input any user into the search window, which you can use (after authorizing it to comb through your friend list) to calculate the number of connections between you and any other user on Facebook.


The wiki image of Six Degrees of separation
So be it that famous celebrity singer or the president of the country, it’ll be interesting to determine your connections! And you thought plots like these were limited to reel life! So the next time, there’s a Hindi drama playing on TV and shows you connections like the one below, don’t be surprised! Some of those are hopelessly unreal, but it could be more common than you think!

A visual representation; an example of Six Degrees of Separation