Skip to main content

The Proximity Challenge

B and I met online a few days ago. His handle was almost as interesting as mine and the profile succinct. Suffice to say that I wrote back to him knowing he was three years younger than me with obviously no end in view. We chat some and it turns out that he has worked around the world and is now finishing up his MBA program from an A list B-school in the US.

He is intelligent and possessed of acerbic wit. After a grueling day at work just what I need to unwind. An hour later we figure there is enough reason to consider exchanging pictures and following up with a coffee shop meeting. The picture part goes very well. He is refined and intellectual looking not dashingly handsome but positively attractive. He for his part has no complaints about what he sees either. We seem to have made excellent progress in less than an hour.

The question of meeting in person follows shortly after. He lives an hour and half away from me so I figure distance is a non-issue. He asks me how he can make to where I live and I tell him what the drive time will be. I am not even sure I have understood his question.

He tells me "I don't drive because I am too lazy" I go into a state of shock. A man his age living in this country for as long as he has and planning on sticking around for the foreseeable future without a driver's license ? I am rendered speechless at this piece of information. In recognition of my feelings he says "It was nice talking to you" and I return "Likewise" and we sign-off posthaste. I have to wonder at the lessons learnt ( if any) from this strange encounter.

Comments

Priyamvada_K said…
The lesson learnt is that seemingly normal people can turn out weird at times.

:-J

Priya.
Anonymous said…
is this not stereotypism? that you expect someone living in US to be such n such. O well, I guess all most people want a normal regular person who is no different from any other.

life is little bit more than prefering to drive a car or not. just my opinion.

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...