Six Degrees of Luckiness

I lay on my bed panicking about the training I had to attend the next day, my feets cold. The panic was not about the subject matter that was to be covered, but about the painful eight hours I need to spend in the training. My room-mate lay on the other side of the room while explaining me the concept of "Six degrees of separation". Even though I couldn't relate six degrees of separation to my current situation of getting a chill due to the up-coming training session I was eager to know the fact.

And Here it goes -
In the late 1960's a person called Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment on the US of A wherein he requested for volunteers. Each volunteer was handed over a package which he/she has to deliver to a totally unknown (or may b known) person (lets say Todd). The volunteers were not provided with any further details such as address of Mr. Todd, the region/location was specified though. The volunteers were supposed to deliver the package to Mr. Todd through any of their first name acquaintances whom they think can help deliver the package to Mr. Todd.

After the experiment Milgram found amazingly that the Packages from the volunteers reached Mr. Todd on an average of six hops. Or to simplyfy, each package from the several volunteers took exaclty 6 intermideary person to get delivered. Eventually Milgram came up with the concept of Six degrees of separation wherein he stated that every person knows every other person(unknown) in the world with a maximum of 6 hops in between. Some people said that eventually in due course of time the number of hops would decrease leading the world to shrink.

Years later a similar experiment was conducted by Richard Wiseman along with a new objective of proving Luck. His experiment included similar volunteers from United Kingdom, who were supposed to deliver a package to some unknown(or... may b known) within the country. He found out a rather similar result but this time the number of hops were reduced to four !! He also observed that people claiming themselves to be unlucky didn't even bothered to pass on the package, when asked for the reason they stated that they couldn't find any person whom they thought would be of help to deliver the package. On the other hand people who claimed themselves as lucky seem to have delivered the package without fail. So does that mean that the social circle of the unlucky people are smaller than the luckier ones or rather they live in a much larger world than the lucky people who have acquaintances.

This anomaly proved that the world was really shrinking (with the help of science and technology ofcourse), and people are just lucky because they know other people or they live in a small world where they know most of the people or are better connected.

A useful piece of information shared by my room-mate, it was. The painful eight hours was suddenly of no pain anymore. I was busy analyzing my luckiness the whole time. Each time, again & again, i tried to answer the question of being lucky or did the fact that "i am really unlucky mean that i know less people? & why ain't the world shrinking for me??"... "do i really know Gorge W. Bush or Kareena Kapoor within six degrees or separation or its just a wishful thinking??"...