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The Fourth Player

My 'driveway moments' used to be in three languages (English, Hindi, and Bengali) until the summer of 2010. Now there is a fourth player.

Urban dictionary defines a driveway moment as "the inability to leave one's car after arriving at the destination because of the riveting nature of a story you're listening to on the radio." I think NPR came up with the original term, so they limited it to 'a story' and 'on the radio.' To me, the term has a broader meaning...anything that you are listening to while driving (or being driven) has the potential to create a driveway moment, including a radio program, a song played on air or from your own CD/music player, an audio book, a voice message, or even audio-based course materials that you listen to on the road. Come to think of it, a driveway moment can include a real conversation (with a co-passenger or on the phone) that started while driving, and didn't quite finish when you reached the destination. But I already see that I am being carried away with just defining a term (I bet the legal professional in me is to be blamed), so let me swerve back on track.

The fourth language that I am talking about is my new-found love, Spanish. I took an evening course on Beginners' Spanish this summer. It was just a series of eight three-hour-long sessions (of which I missed one due to the Japan trip in July)--and I do hope to enroll in the intermediate level course at some point--but I still feel like a new window has already been opened for me. Every little Spanish that I can follow now, be it on a Spanish radio channel, on a website, in a sandwich shop or at a tourist attraction, thrills me like a child. One of Kaiser Permanente's innovative "Thrive" series of ads that claims that learning a new foreign language (among other things) exercises your 'flabby' brain, appears to have a whole new meaning now. Medical studies have shown that learning a new foreign language and keeping at it can prevent or at least delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease, as Catherine Forsythe's blog post reports.

And the more immediate benefits and rewards of being able to communicate in or understand a new language come in surprising little packages. Who knew that being able to exchange simple written notes in Spanish with the cleaning lady can be so exhilarating! These days, many a times I leave notes in broken Spanish on the dining table for my cleaning lady, who makes life so much easier (and tidier) for me every Friday. The notes cover everything from "Clean the inside of the oven this week, please!" to "Please take this piece of cake from my son's birthday." When I come back, I see her return-notes, which are mostly "!Gracias, señora!", but the notes never fail to make this señora contenta...totalmente!

Another immediate reward came in the form of airport announcements. In late August, I was stuck in Atlanta airport for five hours while coming back from a very refreshing East coast trip visiting friends and family. I was indignant to reach home, and was getting frustrated. But one of the things that kept me amused was trying to decipher the airport announcements in Spanish. I was intentionally trying not the listen to the English version of the announcement when it was being played for the first time. Instead, I was listening extra carefully to the Spanish version that followed. When you have to understand what's being announced in order to know what's going on so that you can make your plans accordingly, then automatically you pay the most attention. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I understood basic Spanish to a reasonable extent, because I did cross check the accuracy of my understanding by listening to the repeat of the same announcement in English. You can't take a chance when it comes to going home, after all!


Speaking of the East coast trip, I have to share this amazing article that I got to read during the lazy, beautiful ride on Amtrak, en route to New Jersey from Washington DC. The article, titled, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?", appeared in the New Yorker magazine. The article talks about whether our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts for the lack of ways to express those thoughts. According to the article, "Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about." The author of the article, Guy Deutscher, offers the following example to elaborate. "Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin."

Spanish also forces you to 'disclose' the gender of not only a person (or any living thing for that matter), but of inanimate objects too. I am not a linguist by any stretch of imagination, but I had a hunch that probably all of the so called "Romance Languages"--and the list includes Spanish--have this linguistic gender-dependence, and Wikipedia sort of confirms it.
But, at the same time, Spanish is rather biased in terms of describing the gender of a non-homogeneous group of persons/things. For example, if someone wants to ask you, "How many siblings do you have?", it is sufficient to ask "How many brothers do you have?" Nobody is stopping you from asking, "How many brothers and sisters do you have?", but it is not a must. I guess every language has its quirkiness. That's what makes them endearing.

Well, Spanish is not called a "Romance Language" for nothing. Let's say I will cruise through my mid-life without the proverbial 'mid-life crisis'. Still, this pre-mid-life (or is it mid-life already?) romance of mine with a foreign language is nothing short of an invigorating affair. If you must know, Love (el amor), and Romance (el romance) are assigned masculine genders in Spanish, but 'a romantic affair' (una relación amorosa) is assigned a feminine gender! Now feel free to draw your own conclusion!

P.S. my sis-in-law reminds me (after reading this post), that in Hindi, "Pyar" (love) is masculine, but "Mohabbat" (a more intense version of love) is feminine :-)

Where the Sun Rises

July 10, 2010 has been the longest day of my life. 40 hours long, numerically speaking.

We boarded our flight back to California on July 10th at 5:30 PM at the Narita airport in Tokyo, and landed at San Francisco at 11 AM...still July 10th, still more than half of the day left to catch up on some sleep. I can't sleep at all in a flight. When the plane was touching down on the runway at San Francisco, I was thinking, awash in fresh memories of a perfect vacation amidst a hazy half-awake jet-lagged trance, that exactly 16 hours ago, we were strolling in the Shinjuku-Chuo Koen ('Koen' means park in Japanese) at 11 AM on July 10th in downtown Tokyo, being amused by the co-existence of an open-air public gym (for grown-ups, not the kids' gyms that you see in every park) at stone's throw from the serene Meiji Jingu ('Jingu' means shrine) in the park, and being surprised by the sight of a few makeshift homeless shelters bang in the middle of the otherwise manicured greenery surrounded by the dazzling skyscrapers. Japan is full of interesting contradictions and oodles of things to observe and internalize. So a visitor is never bored.

I consciously did not log on to Facebook (other than a few momentary digressions) during our vacation week. But if I were to post a status message in Facebook summarizing my experience, it would most likely have been something like, "It is a really beautiful country full of pretty and welcoming people. Efficiency, punctuality, and service are at an entirely different level in Japan. You can survive in Japan knowing only English. Throwing in a few Japanese phrases here and there doesn't hurt. And yes, it is an expensive place."

Sapporo: Getting our feet wet in all things Japanese...

Our first destination in Japan was Sapporo (in the Northern island of Hokkaido), famous for its eponymous beer and the 1972 Winter Olympics. My husband Bikash had a conference at Sapporo. We had a very brief layover at Tokyo airport en route to Sapporo on July 4th. We were a bit nervous about whether we would be able to catch the connecting flight, because, we had to clear immigration and customs at Tokyo as our port of entry in Japan, and the United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Tokyo was almost half an hour late. The queue snaking towards the immigration counters was frighteningly long. But the speed at which the queue moved, and we got done with our immigration--fingerprinting, photograph-taking and all--made us totally impressed with the famous Japanese efficiency. Clearing customs and checking our luggage in for the connecting flight were also done in a jiffy, smoothly managed by a young airport crew comprising a noticeably high proportion of young Japanese women, leaving us with enough time to relax at the gate for the flight to Sapporo. If I absolutely have to whine about anything about our first impression of Japan, it would be about the level of air-conditioning at the airport. I guess we are used to expect a rather cool temperature setting in the American airports. Japanese people, like the Indians, seem to be more comfortable at a warmer ambient temperature. May be it is an Eastern thing. May be the philosophy is what's the point of creating an artificially cooler ambiance temporarily when you have to face the hot and sticky summer outside anyways. Summer is uncomfortably hot, specially in the central and southern parts of Japan on the Pacific side.

The taxi ride from the Chitose airport in Hokkaido to downtown Sapporo, where our hotel was, was more than an hour long. The sight of a driving range just outside the airport reminded me that golf is huge in Japan. And so is baseball, at least as a spectator sport, evident by the prominent hoardings everywhere. We also spotted Hollywood movie stars lending their faces to sell everything, the most frequently-sighted ad being Leonardo DeCaprio looking vaguely mysterious in a car tire commercial! I couldn't help but draw parallels with Bill Murray's ageing-American-movie-star-shooting-for-a-Whiskey-ad-in-Tokyo character in "Lost in Translation," one of my favorite movies that had genuinely intrigued me about Japan. As soon as the taxi picked up speed in the expressway leaving behind the more industrialized areas, the billboards were replaced by rain-drenched lush green trees and vines on both sides of the expressway to ease our tired bleary eyes. June and July are the months when the rainy season peaks in Japan.

We reached our hotel in mid-afternoon. From the moment we stepped out of the taxi, we encountered countless courteous staff members at every step of the way, bowing down and uttering "Arigato gozaimas" ("Thank you very much" in Japanese) almost too frequently to make us feel rather self-conscious. I could not shake off the feeling that I hadn't done anything special yet to deserve that kind of a royal treatment. It takes a little while to get used to the fact that customer service is ingrained in the cultural DNA of the Japanese people. We never experienced anything short of superlative customer service in our week-long stay in Japan, split between 4 nights in Sapporo and 2 nights in Tokyo.

Ohayo Sapporo...

The next day, our first 'morning' in Sapporo started really early, 2 AM to be precise. Our son Gogol's body clock was yet to reset, and he was wide awake at 2 AM. We wanted to entertain him with cartoons on TV. But alas, there were only a handful of channels on the TV, and there were absolutely no cartoon channels. I was surprised. Aren't the Japanese the gurus of cartoon? What about the famous Japanese "anime"s and "manga"s? Apparently, cartoons are more popular in comic books and video games than on TV, and Japan is not big on cable/satellite TV anyways, especially outside of the real big cities like Tokyo (Bikash shared his global network engineer's professional knowledge with me.) Thank God we packed Gogol's Nintendo DS. That kept him busy for some time, before, to our utter delight, the horizon started to light up behind the mountains beyond the Sapporo skyline. It was not even 4AM! Sun really rises early in Japan.

Sapporo is a paradise for hikers at all skill levels, and we couldn't be happier to head out early for a neighborhood hike by the side of the Toyohira river that flows invitingly just outside our hotel. Gogol flaunted his Japanese skills by saying "Konichiwa"(Hello) and "Ohayo"(Good morning) to early morning recreational anglers, mostly elderly men, and brisk-walkers, mostly elderly women. I later learnt that average Japanese men live till 78, and average Japanese women live till 86, and there are more than 30,000 centenarians in Japan. It is a country of healthy people.

By the time we were heading back to the hotel for breakfast, we spotted men and women streaming out on the streets on their way to work, on foot or on bicycles, most of them formally dressed. It was Monday morning. Though I have to tell you, the Sapporo morning scene was nothing like the sea of workforce that we witnessed in the later part of our trip in downtown Tokyo around the Shinjuku train station, that apparently serves more than 3 million people daily! We joked in Tokyo that it looked like a penguin colony, as the formal suits were primarily of binary colors--black and white. Formal dressing is almost ubiquitous in Japanese workplace irrespective of the kind of job that you do. Not surprisingly, we spotted countless tailoring shops and even ready-made formal clothing stores both in Sapporo and Tokyo.

Tourism spiced with social observation...

We didn't do any research regarding what to do before coming to Japan. The plan of not planning worked out beautifully, as we got to make random decisions, picking things-to-do from the many brochures stacked in the hotel lobby, and got to rejoice the outcome each day. Among the touristy things that we did in Sapporo, including hanging out in the Odori Park at the heart of the business district in Sapporo, shopping and dining in the Sasukino shopping district, and visiting the beautiful lush Botanical Gardens maintained by the Hokkaido University with a breathtaking rose garden and an enviable taxidermy collection, Gogol was the happiest visiting the Maruyama Zoo. The zoo was really impressive, as we got to see some Hokkaido natives, such as the Tundra wolves and flying squirrels. That Japan is a fairly conservative society was evident in the design of the rest areas inside the zoo. There were dedicated closed-door rooms for the nursing mothers in the rest areas, and the doors of the nursing roosm and the ladies' bathrooms reached down to the floor to seal the users' modesty. Gogol rightly pointed out that the zoo was the only place where he saw of lot of children. The famously declining birth rate in Japan is acutely visible everywhere (see this article). The national statistics of an average of 1.2 child/couple has a lot to do with Japanese women choosing to marry and bear children later than ever in favor of enjoying a rewarding career. It almost became my hobby in Japan to study the body languages of working women to have an idea of how powerful and comfortable they seem to feel. As expected, the Tokyo women looked a lot more confident. But in a smaller city like Sapporo, which I believe gave us a truer glimpse to the overall socio-economic reality of Japan, the one or two women who looked like they were enjoying a power dinner with their male colleagues, did stand out among the plethora of women who were just 'playing their part' in looking attractive in fashionable clothes, and/or performing efficiently in the routine sorts of work, relatively speaking. However, I have to add that I strongly felt that, just like Indian women, Japanese women are going through the coming-of-age phase, taking strong strides towards playing meatier roles outside of home.

Doing touristy things in Sapporo also included visiting the famous Hokkaido Jingu in the Maruyama Koen. It is a Shinto shrine, where we got to witness the confluence of the more ancient nature-worshipping traditions of Shintoism with the relatively modern and perhaps a bit more ritualistic traditionas of Buddhism. You can write down your wish in a scroll, and tie it on a rope in front of the shrine. Gogol added his wish among the thousands of other wishes. His wish was to see his pet goldfishes healthy when he would get back to California after his vacation.

Serene Serendipity...

While walking back to the underground metro station from Maruyama Koen, we caught a glimpse of some very intriguing statues behind the criss-cross of the immediate foliage. We were too curious not to explore what was there, and it turned out to be the most precious serendipitous discovery of our entire Japan trip. We found an uphill trail that led to the top of Mount Maruyama. The trail itself was not that arduous, but what gave us goosebumps were the numerous statues of Lord Buddha sprinkled in the virgin wilderness lining the trail, each of the statues different from the others, showcasing the vivid imaginations of the worshipper-sculptors. The statues were not sophisticated works of art, barring a few. But the most remarkable thing that we noticed was that all of them had at least a piece of ritualistic cloth, looking like a baby's bib, covering the torso area, which is kind of surprising, because we are used to seeing mostly bare-bodied Bodhisattwa statues. I later read that the statues are of Kannon Bodhisattwa, who is sometimes considered a female incarnation among some Buddhists in Japan. Hence, the urge to cover the torso of the statues, I guess. I remembered that we used to periodically visit the Asian-art-focused Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian museums when we used to live in Washington, DC. Seeing the statues in their original setting, rather than in a museum, made me feel as if I was riding an organic time tide that was transporting me to the ancient times. I thought anything additional to this experience would be a bonus--I was already bathing in the much-sought sense of wonder that brought us to Japan in the first place.

Megapolis...

As intriguing as Sapporo was, Tokyo did impress us with its own brand of charm. I have seen some huge metropolises, but Tokyo screams Megapolis! Yes, the greenery was missing, but there was some harmonizing design symmetry visually palpable in the city that made even an asphalt jungle looked pretty, despite its enormous size (here's a link to Bikash's Tokyo photo album). I guess the city was largely rebuild after the world war II with a very careful vision of how it should look like when it rises again. The measured architectural aesthetics of the hotel lobby itself (we stayed at the Hilton at Shinjuku) drew us in. Again, the hotel attendants were bowing down left and right, but by this time, we were relatively used to that gesture. The view from our hotel window on the 23rd floor compensated for the meticulously furnished but undeniably compact floorspace of the room. Finally in Tokyo, Gogol had access to multiple cartoon channels, but he chose to hang out at the window sill, and when Gogol was asleep, I saw Bikash setting up his tripod by the side of the window to capture the city's night glory. The lady in the family was too happy to see the guys in the family being smitten by the city, forgetting all about their respective electronic addictions.

The Mountain and the Valley...

On our second day in Tokyo, we decided to head out to Mount Fuji and Hakone on a conducted bus tour. We had the most entertaining tour guide, who I should thank for many of the demographic and geographic statistics that I have sprinkled throughout this blog (so, if he was wrong, I am wrong too). Mount Fuji is 12,388 feet high at its summit. Our bus took us up to the fifth station (at a height of 7,500 feet) en route to the summit, where the paved road ends. We were literally walking through the rain cloud when we got down from the bus to walk up to the rest station. I felt so nostalgic, thinking about our trip to Kedarnath (in the Himalayas) back in 1992, where we did a 14 kilometer hike on foot through rain and shine with my parents and my siblings. I ended up buying a bunch of picture post cards, and wrote a little note to my parents on one of them. It was the pen-and-paper version of my private 'tweet'...didn't matter even if my parents didn't get to see it instantaneously. The tour guide said there is a post office at the summit of Mount Fuji, which is still operational. Would have been nice to post my post card from there, I guess. But this time, we had to be satisfied with just the view of the summit, and perhaps with a dream of coming back to scale all the way up sometime in future.

Next stop was Hakone, the famous historic town nestled in the volcanically active Fuji-Hakone-Izu national park. It was still raining hard. But the rain endowed Hakone with such an out-of-this-world emerald hue that I forgot I usually don't like rain that much. We had a nice lunch at Hakone, and then went on to ride hanging cable cars (they are also called 'ropeway' in Japan, just like in India) across the mountains to go to Lake Ashi at the center of the Hakone valley. The cable car ride was interesting not only for the views that it offered from the elevation, but also for the co-passengers that we got to share the ride with. We met an American-Mexican couple (the husband lives in Mexico, and the wife in Arizona), who were vacationing in Japan. They said they spend most of their together time vacationing outside of either America or Mexico before they can sort out the immigration thing.

A dragon-shaped boat ride on Lake Ashi was the last activity of the day, before we went back to the tour bus. In a brilliant stroke of tourism-business-wisdom, our conducted tour gave us the option of going back to Tokyo in the bus, or taking the bullet train ("Shinkansen") from Odawara station to Tokyo. The train ride came at additional cost and inconvenience, as we had to arrange our own transportation from the train station to our hotel, while the return journey by the bus was at no additional cost, and included door-to-door service. It was raining pretty hard. On a regular day, opting for the train would have made no sense. But when you are in Japan, you can't go back without stepping into the Shinkansen. So we took the train, and finally reached our hotel exhausted and drenched. But what is travel if you do not do a few crazy touristy things! That was our last night in Japan. We topped off the night with a fantastic traditional dinner at an authentic Japanese restaurant. Let me tell you, if you thought Sushi is the staple food in Japan, then you will be in for a surprise, when you actually visit Japan. It might be a small country, but it sure knows what variety is..in food, and in everything else.

On our way back, while admiring the intricate Origami art collection at the Tokyo airport, I kept thinking that, Japan, with its abundant beauty and complex culture, has sure whetted our appetite for more trips to the Orient.

She Almost Makes Me Want to Believe in the Possibility of Reincarnation

She is 76. She looks 60 at the most. Her hair is still jet black (may be dyed, but it doesn’t really matter.) She danced like there is no tomorrow…literally. She said, “I’m in limbo now…not deeply entangled in the worldly existence anymore, but not quite up there either. And when you reach the limbo, at least you no longer have any inhibition about dancing.” She enjoyed her dancing so much that, at rare moments, she overlooked that her voice was cracking because of breathlessness from the dancing. She almost forgot that thousands of fans filled the auditorium to listen to the singing legend that she is, not necessarily to watch her having a good time on stage—dancing, cracking jokes, and just being a diva with the characteristic innocent but starry tantrums.

I can't believe I am writing back-to-back fan posts, as my last blog was about admiring Shah Rukh Khan, but this blog forced itself out almost at midnight after I came back from Asha Bhosle’s live concert at Cupertino earlier tonight. I already knew that Asha is a prolific singer, but tonight I learnt that she has recorded 13,000 songs in her career, and counting! I had watched her perform live back in 1998 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. I was impressed even then when I came to know that she was 65, and still commanded the stage like a young, dynamic performer, who was definitely much more than just a singer. It was simply astonishing to see her tonight after twelve years, as if she has been frozen in time! She looked exactly the same. Her trademark diamond bracelet and the sequins on her brightly-hued saris still gleamed as dazzlingly as they did back then. She is still the vivacious ‘girl’ whose youth rubs off on you. That she can still sing ‘Piya tu ab to aaja,’ ‘Chura liya’ and ‘Mera kuchh samaan’ with ease was enough for me to sway with her music, overlooking the occasional off-key tonality. But, when I was coming out of the auditorium at the end of the concert, I did overhear a few teenagers complaining about being rather disappointed by Asha’s performance. I don’t blame them. They most likely didn’t grow up listening to new chart-buster numbers by Asha as we did. They may have heard her songs being played by their parents, or may have only heard the remixed versions of the originals sung by Asha herself, or some other cover-version artists. Recorded or re-engineered music often sounds more perfect, but lacks the soul of a live performance. The soul is something you connect with as a result of your collective memories and emotions associated with the songs. Unfortunately, the disappointed teenagers didn’t have that advantage. They just saw an old woman delivering an average performance and getting distracted by her own antics. My poor teenagers! One day your children will also come out disappointed from a Nick Jonas concert!

Well, for me, I did feel the soul tonight. The concert was totally worth spending more than half-an hour stuck in traffic trying to find a parking. The boom of the live orchestra resonating within my body, the wild shake-twist by the middle-aged silicon valley techie in my front seat, even Asha’s dancing, and her co-artist Sudesh Bhosle’s gentlemanly gesture of stealthily stretching his hand in case the singing and dancing diva trips by accident—every little thing worked for me. The ageless Asha almost made me want to believe in the concept of next life after this one, if I get to come back with half her talent and energy.

My Name is Fan

The other day I watched “Ishqiya,” the latest Bollywood offering from the insanely talented Vishal Bhardwaj’s stable, and I was so impressed, that I felt the need to let all my social network friends know what a great movie it was. The obvious question is: how do I compare “Ishqiya” with the recent big banner productions, “3 Idiots,” and “My name is Khan” (MNIK). If you think you have got a clue from the title of this blog, then you may be in for a surprise.

On a cinematic experience scale, I rate “Ishqiya” above “3 Idiots,” followed by MNIK.

But this blog is not about which movie I liked the most. This blog is about whether I am any less of a fan of King Khan. The answer is a big thundering “NO”! I am not a fan because my hero delivers the brainiest or even the most entertaining movies—there are other people whom I genuinely admire to cater to that need—I am a fan because I intensely enjoy the evolving human connection with him. As Eve Ensler’s recent book’s title proudly declares, ‘I am an emotional creature.’ I have grown up and am still growing up watching, liking, and emotionally connecting with the person that Shah Rukh Khan(SRK) is through his films. This connection is more real than a fantasy, and more fantastic than reality—the perfect twilight zone that I have willingly created for myself.

I know I am not the only one who feels this way. I think at some level, this blog took shape in my head when I read a very well-written tribute to SRK by another blogger Suhel Banerjee, the blog post titled, “My Name Is Khan – An Unabashed Fan Post”. Suhel writes, “It's been a little over a day since I came back from the theatre after watching Sir's latest offering - My Name Is Khan. Since then I have made several well meaning and failed attempts to review the movie. That's when I realised that the idol worshipping fan inside me won't let the wannabe movie critic come out till he has had his say. First heart, then head as Sir famously said in so many of his movies.” Thank you, Suhel. I couldn’t have expressed it any better myself.

So what is it about SRK that is so appealing? He is not the most good-looking person on earth. I have seen him perform live on a stage show, and I’ll be honest, I was not swept away. He looked ordinary. He definitely looks better on screen or even in the still shots, when the camera closes in, and you get a glimpse of the energy bubbling inside him exuding through his eyes. I hate that he smokes. I worry that he will die of lung cancer. I hate when he tries to act oversmart, and makes a stupid joke. But I love when his eyes well up in a talk show on TV, talking about his mother, who had died before she could see her son become a superstar—his greatest regret in life. You get the drift. I feel involved.

The fact that he is rather limited in terms of his acting ability, even after so many years in the industry, is actually quite endearing. When he acts really well—for example, in “Chak De India” his work is superlative and beyond criticism—everyone is still pleasantly surprised. As Raja Sen, the movie critic at Rediff so aptly describes while reviewing MNIK, “We know his name. Each and every one of us. He's been the country's de facto Superstar -- a position which inevitably brings its share of can't-act brickbats, the kind Brad [Pitt] and Tom[Cruise] still face with every release -- for nearly two decades[.]”

Surprisingly, I do not have the same kind of unconditional indulgence for Kajol. Arguably, she is a much better actor than SRK. When I watched “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge,” in 1995, I liked SRK and Kajol equally. But while Kajol still reminds me of the young girl that I was, SRK reminds me of the journey that I have had from 1995 till now. Unfair towards Kajol? Perhaps. Irrationally lenient towards SRK? Of course! That’s why I am a ‘fan,’ and not an unbiased connoisseur, when it comes to SRK.

Over the years, Shah Rukh Khan has transcended the stature of a star, or even the stature of a mere human being in my mind. He has become almost a concept, or may be an abstract theory that I use to explain some of my apparently weird logics or idiosyncratic thoughts, convictions and/or actions.

Let me elaborate with an example. Last November, a close friend and I went on to enjoy a girls-only trip in the beautiful coastal town of Mendocino, away from our families. Being eternally-jaded working moms, we were justfiably thrilled when the trip was drawing near. We had made time for a luxurious pedicure session, and had planned to take perfect vacation pictures of us relaxing with our legs stretched on a poolside lounger--the camera panning on our freshly-pedicured toes. But when we actually went to Mendocino, the holiday feeling was so immersive on its own, that taking pictures to prove that we were really having a good time seemed superfluous. That’s when I discovered, the pedicure was more than a pedicure---it was an embodiment of the excitement that we felt at the prospect of an upcoming vacation. Much in the same way, Shah Rukh Khan is more than a Bollywood superstar. He is an embodiment of the irrational but immensely pleasing sways of my mind. Coming back from the vacation, I updated my Facebook status as, “Pedicure is Shah Rukh Khan in Mendocino.” Readers were expectedly confused, but I knew what I meant :-)

My name is fan, and I am not shy about admitting it.

Parallel Journeys

All of us walk side by side with others, sometimes as silent spectators (if not as voyeurs), and sometimes as companions.

I remember last year around this time I decided to appear for an important professional examination. One of my then-pregnant colleagues took the journey with me from the first day I decided that I was going to sit for that exam to the very last day when I declared triumphantly that I have passed. She didn’t have to share astute strategies of tackling the exam with me. It was not even in her practice area. But she got all excited about sharing her knowledge and proven strategies of exam success, because she enjoyed the shared journey. It allowed her to look back at her own days of taking competitive exams, the thrills of it —without actually having to do the drill herself— rather than thinking 24/7 about preparing herself for the life-after-baby. I was already a mother of a preschooler. I guess I needed the distraction of preparing for an exam. But at the same time I was also walking the vicarious walk of a first-time mom-to-be—from accompanying my colleague to a prospective daycare close to work that she was excited to find out, to sharing the ‘worried-Asian-mothers-in-laws-whose-pregnant-daughters-in-law-were-still-working’ stories. For women, it is all about compartmentalizing their life into these little boxes called work, family, hobbies etc., and happily seeing the demarcations blur.

Very recently, I took a parallel journey with another close friend, who just relocated back to India. She epitomized what a good neighbor should be. We knew each other from our undergraduate days in India. Then we happened to enroll at the same graduate school, happened to have kids at the same time (second kid for her, first for me), and happened to land in the same neighborhood in the bay area (at different times though)—none of it pre-coordinated, but all of it working fantastically for both me and my friend, and for our respective children.

It is not a secret that over time, most first-generation immigrants perfect the skill of living simultaneously in two worlds. With Obama as the President of the United States, you don’t even have to be sheepish about admitting your dual life these days. We pay equal attention to the gossip columns on Bollywood and Hollywood. We weep when our elderly parents let us know that they are managing fine by themselves, finally accepting the fact that their bright children are doing too well in their adopted land to come back, and then on the next day, we gloat in the glory of being ‘truly global’ in the flat world. Still, when a close friend actually moves back to India, we can’t help but feel sad. To compensate, we match virtual strides with the ones who are going back, and sometime we more than compensate—we actually have fun along the way!

For me the funniest experience was when I visited the Open House event that their realtor organized to sell their house. It was my friend’s husband’s bright idea that I go to the Open House event, pretending to be a prospective homebuyer, to have a feel about how things were going. I have visited their house countless times after we had moved into the neighborhood. I thought I’d raise suspicion, because it’d be hard for me to pull off the scrutinizing look of a prospective buyer who is visiting for the first time. But I guess I did an adequate job, assisted by the fact that with other families flowing in and out, it was impossible for the realtors to track my minutest expressions. I dutifully asked why the owners were selling, was I going to get a good deal because the owners were in a hurry to sell, how good the nearest elementary school was—the array of questions you are supposed to ask while considering buying a home. I even asked about the fruit trees in the backyard! And before I left, I promised to come back with my family for another round of look the next day.

Later that week, my friend informed me that the house sold quickly without any hassle. I was really happy for them. We hovered when they packed their final suitcases. Our children played together and sat down together to eat dinner. Nobody was overly sentimental. With emails and Facebook and photo sharing over the web, is there any real reason to be sentimental? But then why do you check your mailbox eagerly for the mail that describes how their first week in India was?

I am sure my friend left a piece of her heart in California too. She’ll think of her car still being driven on California roads by the current owner. She’ll think about our kids frolicking together in the swimming pool. She’ll think about the kids hiding inside an empty cardboard box left at her house after all their stuff had been shipped to India. She’ll think about orchestrating a business trip to the bay area as soon as the settling logistics are taken care of.

You can’t experience everything in your lifetime. But you sure can experience a lot more than just the things going on in your own life when you let yourself take the parallel journeys with friends that life brings your way.