When the Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
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Meetups

Meetups can be predictable, and also, totally unpredictable and unexpected.  In the Bay Area, we meet people consistently without a planned agenda.  Sometimes, we go to a restaurant and it just doesn't feel right, "How come we haven't met anyone today? What's wrong?"

We have really had strange encounters.

I had gone to the nearest Indian restaurant with my colleague.  Nowadays, I don't even act surprised when I see someone I know.  It's become a part of life.  I just greet and move on.

Anyway, we both picked our stuff and were having our food at the table.  Suddenly, I see someone walk up front, order his food and walk back to his table.  I immediately told my colleague, "I think I know him.  He resembles a guy who was in Boston, but what is he doing here? I don't even know whether it's the same guy."

My colleague told me to go talk to him if I was so confused.  

I figured I would rather go talk to him, than wonder the rest of the day whether I should have talked to him or not.  After all, if he wasn't the guy who I thought him to be, it's not like he was going to throw the plate of food and abuse me or something.  I mean what's the worst that could happen, right?

So, I went up to him, sat in front of him, and said "Hello".

It was the same person who I thought he was.

"Ennada, Praveen!", he said.  "Great to see you.  How are you doing?"

"Good, good"

 "I knew you were in the bay area, because I saw your post about India Cash and Carry, Sunnyvale.  I told Nithya that you should be somewhere around here.  I moved to the bay area a few months ago."

And, obviously, with the kids, they had to be in Cupertino (school, education, you see).

That was coincidental to the highest degree.

Anyway, last week we had my friend's parents visiting us.  They told us they had been to Muir Woods.

Mami said, "There are so many Indians here.  You know what happened? I met my school class mate in Muir Woods."

"We were talking about the area we had lived in Madras, and suddenly, after some time, we realized we were class mates", she continued.

My wife and I burst out laughing.  "In Bay Area, you always meet someone you know."

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