It may be the smallest of things - freaky telepathic connections that happen out of the blue or a bizarre recollection of past, or even future, events - things we can't explain, things that seem almost magical.

No doubt such occurrences have been known to exist since the dawn of Man.  What was called the force of Mother Nature in the ancient times went on to become the Hand of God, then witchcraft and is now finally dismissed as weird phenomenon that cannot be explained and should not be given much thought to.
Perhaps it is this that endeared us most to the world of Harry Potter.

Not the story of an abused lonely boy who is tormented by his relatives, but the fact that he is redeemed, rescued. All the odd phenomena that kept happening around Harry were finally explained. Take for example, the time when the Dursleys took Harry to the zoo. Dudley, his pig-like cousin, kept teasing and taunting Harry, while he was seething inside. Somehow, at that very moment, the glass that protected visitors from the snake enclosure vanished; and the snake made a beeline for Dudley. Even though the snake decided against attacking the massive boy, Dudley found himself inside the snake enclosure and the glass reappeared, shutting him inside, almost as if by magic.

All this happens when Harry is not yet aware that he is a wizard. It is when Hagrid comes knocking on Harry's door that he gets to know, and is enrolled in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It is then that all the unusual phenomena are explained; it is then that his magical abilities are unleashed in full spirit.
Is there such a thing?

This is what most of us yearn for. When things happen suddenly, without any apparent or logical explanation, it is, no doubt, highly unnerving. But when such things happen again and again, then, apart from the utter confusion and fright, you begin wondering whether there really is such a thing like magic.

"One morning, I dreamt that I was seeing dead people. I actually saw my grandfather who had passed away a few months before, but strangely, I also saw my grand-uncle, who was alive at the time. I dismissed it as just another crazy dream, but I got shocked when my grand-uncle died that very night," says Rosa H, a student of Microbiology. "I've tried to tell this to a lot of people, but I stopped after most of them didn't believe me. I don't want to be called a nutter. Also, very strangely, it's never happened again," she says.

This sounds exactly like Sybil Trelawney, Harry's Divination teacher, who got one or two lucky prophecies. But Rosa is not alone in this. Poorna Prasad, a working mother, says she is often plagued by an uneasy feeling of impending doom. "It really happens without any cause - I may be working in the kitchen or may be at work, when I start feeling uneasy and uncomfortable. I get a niggling thought in my mind that something bad is going to happen. Invariably, 99.9% of the time, the day doesn't end pleasantly," she says.

You could say that Poorna can foresee consequences in her mind, but they are not based on a logical sequence of events. She may predict an outcome while something is just in its initial starting phase. And it is always against popular opinion.

"I always think of consequences that no one expects and no one believes will happen. It may be something very small or even a major incident, but I cannot discard the feeling or ignore it, because everytime I get it, something happens," she adds.

Haven't we all had times where our mind gives us a tiny little warning? Say, something tells you not to buy that Black Forest cake at the local bakery and then later, you hear reports that the dodgy cake caused food poisoning in a dozen people. However could you have known about the illness? Could you have performed ‘Leglimensia’ without knowing it?

 This is called ESP - Extra Sensory Perception - and comes under the highly debatable field of parapsychology.

Traditionally, ESP is believed to include four aspects:

*Psychokinesis - the ability to move physical objects only with the power of the mind
*Telepathy - the ability to exchange thoughts without speaking them out or writing them down, only through the mind
*Clairvoyance - the ability to see/know things that are happening in a different place

*Precognition - the ability to see/know things before they actually happen

All this may sound like it is taken directly from a book of fantasy, or from the pages of Harry Potter, where all it takes are a few non-verbal spells to move things, speak without speaking and even see things in a different place. But scientists have been researching such phenomena for more than 50 years, most of whom have come up with conclusive results.

Scientists like Dean Radin, J B Rhine, who coined the term ESP, Russell Targ, Harold E Puthoff and others have investigated psi phenomena (as they are called; pronounced 'sy') in the US and UK for many years. But the study of ESP suffers from an abundance of sceptics who are both emotionally disinterested and have adequate credentials to negate the field.

It is in the blood...
For example, medical researcher Kenneth J Dillon argues that there is a cellular basis for receiving and transmitting psi phenomena. He said that red blood cells act with a kind of primitive intelligence and fulfills the criteria. But his theories remained just that - theories - because they were refuted.

"There are many pro-ESP groups who believe that every human being is born with the ability for ESP, but this ability gets suppressed as the person grows, due to the great emphasis on logical thinking. I believe this is true," says Ashwini Baitmangalkar, a Research Fellow in parapsychology. "From school, we are taught to focus on and use only the left part of our brain, while the right part remains dormant. The right brain is the one that is involved in psi phenomena. Many scholars have tried to document such phenomena, but a lot of question marks exist because phenomena like these cannot be repeated exactly the same way keeping everything constant everytime. It is not like a physics or chemistry experiment. Say, for example, I'm a psychic, but if I have a big fight with my mother, my psychic abilities can be blocked at that time.  “The best way to explain this would be to compare it to sports. All of us can run, all of us can swing a bat, but there are a few who are talented. In the same way, a few of us are gifted in psi abilities.

Now, if Sachin Tendulkar has an off-day while playing cricket, it's understandable. But when a psychic has an off-day, it is easily dismissed. That is why it takes a lot of trials in very controlled circumstances to prove for sure phenomena that are not explainable," she adds.

But proven, or not, a plethora of psi phenomena and abilities exist in the world even among ordinary, everyday people. And it is not always the bad ones that surface, most of the things that happen actually make our lives a better place to live.

For example, there have been cases of plants growing faster and better when people have willed it in their mind, or when ill children have healed when their mothers have focussed only on them getting better.

"The most famous example is that of the 9/11 attack. There were so many people in New York who decided not to go to work on that day because they weren't feeling too good about going outside, some even felt uneasy and decided to stay at home. They then saw that they had been saved from the disaster. There was even the instance of one small boy who got a feeling that something bad was going to happen. He refused to go to school himself or let his mother go to work. He fussed about and threw a royal tantrum, but his mother finally managed to drop him off to his class. She got late to work, and by the time she reached, she saw that the Twin Towers had already fallen," Ashwini adds.

Beyond the obvious
Even among us living in India, small things happen everyday to brighten up our lives. Savita R, a publishing professional, says:

"Everytime I think about a person suddenly, out of the blue, for no specific reason, I'm sure to meet them that day or that week. These are not people I'm likely to meet in the course of everyday life. They may be friends living abroad, or people I haven't seen in years. It happens totally out of context, but I know that when I suddenly think of a person, I'm going to meet them. It's a great feeling."

Vipasana Kulkarni, an artist, says she shares a strange telepathic connection with both her sister and her daughter. "When I was a child, my sister and I would always know what the other was thinking, and would always say the same things at the same time. It was like having another me. I dismissed it as a childhood fantasy. But now, my 17-yr-old daughter and I share a similar connection. We both know exactly what is going on in each other's mind, sometimes we can even sense distress or trouble. We think alike and say it out loud simultaneously. And when my sister also joins us, it's a laugh riot," she says laughing.

Wizards amongst us
We may or may not be witches or wizards or be part of a magical world where anything's possible. People may not even believe that such phenomena exist and can happen. But it's the mystery of it all that makes it so cherished. Precognition will perhaps be used in the future to see crime before it happens, to avert disaster before it strikes - the way it was used in the movie Minority Report. Telepathic connections will probably replace pen and paper, even eliminate the need for a computer or a worldwide network.

It's just a matter of seeing, and believing, beyond the obvious.

Rabbit out of the hat experience
Sometimes, ESP can stretch beyond the mundane. There have been quite a few instances where people have gone through out of body experiences and even some bizarre paranormal phenomena. Here are a few:

Reincarnation?
Recently, four-year-old Upasana, born to illiterate parents in Khurja in UP, claimed that her name is Kalpana Chawla and that she died up in the skies four years ago. Residents of her village believe she might be the reincarnation of the India-born astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who died when US space shuttle Columbia crashed four years ago. Her father Raj Kumar, a labourer, says he has never even heard of a Kalpana Chawla, but Upasana has been telling them that she is the late astronaut since she first started speaking. Upasana has been saying that her father's name is Banarsi Das Chawla and that her spacecraft was hit by a huge ball of ice that sent it crashing. Upasana was born barely two months after the astronaut's death in 2003.

Blow to the head
Everything was normal when 14-year-old Rajesh and his 16-year-old brother Kaluwa were erecting a wall outside their house in a village 40 kms from Saharanpur in UP. But when their mentally-retarded father began troubling them and tearing down the wall whenever they turned their backs, Rajesh got irritated. He threw a brick at his father, who, angered, threw another back at Rajesh. The brick hit the boy's head and he began bleeding. Nothing happened for another three months; Rajesh was just dumbfounded and didn't talk.

Then suddenly, the boy, without any evident help, started speaking fluently in English and does so with a proper American drawl. He also seems to have forgotten how to speak Hindi.

Rajesh's knowledge of physics and mathematics has left engineering students baffled. Having already penned three books, Rajesh is now looking forward to some research work. "Memory can't be destroyed till there are sound waves in the world," Rajesh offers in mysterious explanation. After the incident, Rajesh was enrolled last year in the William Jefferson Clinton Science and Technology Centre. "I did not take him seriously for the first few months, but on Republic Day, while the students were reciting poetry before the entire college, Rajesh took the mike and addressed the gathering in fluent English. This left us almost shell-shocked," says Shishu Pal Singh Verma, principal of the college.

NI