March 30, 2001

an unexpected guest

disclosure: when i was a kid, and the then-towering-above-me aunts and uncles would ask “beta, what do you want to be when you grow up?” my reply was always ready, “an autodriver!!”

seeing the surprised and amused expressions on their faces, i tried my best explaining to them that “autodrivers get to travel around for free, you see! and then, they get to meet new people after every passenger gets off. the best part is, they never know who’s going to get in next, and they can always learn something about the passenger seated in the rickshaw (because they can hear the conversation, if there’s more than one person) and they also get paid after everything!!”

suspecting that they haven’t really believed what i said, i’d make a stern face and add, “and because there are no women rickshaw drivers around.”

well, i did not become an autodriver. for that matter, i still havent learnt driving.

but i still love meeting new people, especially if i don’t know anything about them, be it introducing myself to my neighbours, speaking to the maid next door, the autodriver, the storekeeper or the dabbawallah.

my interaction with foreigners has been limited to very short conversations with
a) the director for chip (worldwide) magazines from vogel verlag, dr gerald o dick, who visited us in india when we started chip, and took the entire chip team (we were about 10 then) to esselworld.

b) a lovely coffee + interview with kenneth keniston, deepak’s close friend and a very active member of MIT’s project for globalising local language for computers in india.

c) the 20-minute interview with adrian cowderoy, director of the multimedia house of quality, uk, at the QAI-SEPG seminar at bangalore last year. i was to interview the speaker at the seminar that day, but i’d reached late, and it was not until lunch-break that i realised that they had changed the speaker who was scheduled for the day…i was in the wrong hall!

well, an interview with the speaker i *had* to submit when i got back to itspace. but when i walked up to him, he was rushing to catch a flight back to bombay in 30 mins. i quickly suggested i could drop him at the airport, since my office was on the way (well, in truth, it was a wee bit out of the way, but well, duty calls! 😉 and that’s how a got my 20-minute interview with a very surprised adrian, in the taxi to the airport.

but all these rather abrupt interactions just left me very curious. what would it be like to spend more time with someone from another country? or to live in a foreign land?

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