Un patrón recorre toda vida.

Sethuraman was born on the 31st of May, 1925, and educated at Tiruchirapalli. He joined the Indian defence services under the British crown as a young man during the Second World War, and rose quickly on hard work and a sharp mind.

What he did next was not what officers usually do with their spare hours. He began keeping records — the dates of birth of the men in his unit, the spellings of their names, and what subsequently happened to them. Promotions. Reversals. Injuries. Deaths.

The correspondence he found between those two sets of facts was regular enough that he could not put it down. He resigned his commission, forgoing rank and salary, and in 1954 published Adhista Vingyanam — Science of Fortune — in Tamil.

The book was never advertised. Not once, in seventy years. It reached twenty-six printings because readers who had been helped by it pressed it on other readers, and those readers did the same.