normal distribution...

As the weekend dawns, to begin with, a couplet from Bashiir Badr’s ghazal:

Ko.ii haath bhii na milaayegaa, jo gale miloge tapaak se
ye naye mizaaj kaa shahar hai, zaraa faasale se milaa karo |

(If you embrace someone out of the blue, nobody will even shake hands with you. This city is of a different mood; keep a safe distance in meeting others…)

In college we had this course called Probability and Statistics (ProbStat in short). Though I was only able to clinch a safe ‘C’ somehow, yet there was a probability distribution which captured my fancy. It was Normal Distribution or the Gaussian distribution with that characteristic Bell Curve which looked more like a mountain in paintings of kindergarten students. Whenever the professor drew that curve on board I used to wait for him to draw clouds and sun coming from behind the mountains. But instead of sun, when professor wrote scaring formulae and hypotheses beside that curve, it used to wake me up from my imagination and I scribbled them down for the upcoming test series, which never helped.

It was a few years after accepting my defeat in ProbStat (and subsequently in evens and odds of life) I realized the importance of Normal distribution. Most of the world’s phenomena follow this distribution. Traffic jams, ATM downtime, grading, elections, carbon dating, inflation, geometry of selfish herd, habits – every place where there is a possibility of precision in the crowd comprising of people with similar goals, normal distribution is applicable. Take for example a population of people who are into body building. There are very few John Abraham’s with 6 packs on their stomach and the majority lies in between John and Johnny Lever. Similarly majority lies between Sachin and Agarkar in population of cricketers. Based on this normal distribution I received my ‘C’ in the course because when the professor finally drew that fateful graph of post examination marks, I fell at the ‘C’ side of boundary of ‘D’ and ‘C’.

The point that normal curve proclaims is pretty simple – there are very few extraordinary people (be it on the positive side or the negative side) in this world and majority lies in being an average.

What is the point? Since we all are in one crowd or the other, knowing our position in the normal curve can give us some insight to our life. What about the couplet in the beginning? Well, there lies another crowd and another normal distribution.