Punya Mishra’s Web

A funny (and yet somewhat sad) story …
So I am in Nagpur airport waiting for my flight, which had been delayed, and I struck up a conversation with a young man there, as one is wont to do. We of course started by complaining about the airlines, then moved on to sharing horror stories and personal experiences with travel. At some point it was clear that we needed to introduce ourselves and we did. It turned out he was a doctor traveling to Mumbai to join an MD program. I told him about myself, and gave him my visiting card (I have a lot of these with me since I was traveling to S.E. Asia, and one cannot do without visiting cards in that part of the world).

So here’s the funny part… he read my card carefully, looked up with a beatific smile (as if meeting a long lost friend or having found some significant connection), almost stumbling over his words in excitement. “This is so wonderful,” he said, “I am also a Brahmin.”

I knew that one’s last name signals a person’s caste, but this had never been so blatantly been pointed out to me before, and never as a “shared” attribute that would, for some reason, bring us closer. For once, I had nothing to say!

| Posted on: May 29th, 2008
Other related posts and pages: |Tasteless and offensive | Arthur C. Clarke, RIP | Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined | The pleasures of being a teacher | The reluctant fundamentalist |

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