Pleasure and prejudice...

So, I was in Chicago last week, which by the way, has the most beautiful downtown that I have seen so far. I was going from O'Hare to Lake/Clark station to my hotel room. I did not get a seat until half way through the forty-five minute ride. I was in a portion of the compartment where all the seven passengers were brown. A few people got down at a station and there were two vacant seats. One among the brown guys which was closest to where I was standing and the other one beside a young blond woman in her early twenties. It was more than a couple of rows away. So, I thought for a moment about which seat I should take. I wanted to SEIZE this opportunity to prove a point that, the brown guys don't really travel in packs and in fact we like to get assimilated with the general American public. So, I RUSHED to sit beside the blond woman.

Here I was, with a NOBLE intention of disproving all the stereotypical notions about desis and as soon as I sat down on the chosen seat, everybody was looking at me as if I had broken some unwritten law or something. I gave a big smile to the petite woman beside me to which she did not smile back and instead to my great surprise, was almost saying...YOU CREEP. I was like....WHAT? WHAT did I do wrong? The reaction of the brown guys was even more appalling as if, we were into some kind of a secret brown man's club and I breached it's code of conduct. In fact, I was preserving the brown man's identity by trying to stand out among a group of white people. So, in those few moments, I knew EXACTLY how Gandhi must have felt in Durban, South Africa a century ago. In essence, I was reliving an experience that's going to potentially make a Mahatma out of me. But, it was funny how people misconstrued my true intentions ;)...