I was going to work the other day,...

...the day after the US elected it's new president. An elderly black woman walked by me and gave me a friendly smile. Nothing wrong with that, right. But, the monkeybrain inside me started wondering what would happen if I congratulate her for Barack Obama winning the election. Would I be accused of being a racist for assuming that she would be overjoyed at his election simply because of their common racial identity? I think not. As Jerry Seinfeld would say, "If I like their race, how can that be racist?" ;)

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 ;)...

The pilot...

I'm back to blogging. Not that I ever took it really seriously or anything. But hopefully, this time around, it's going to be a regular exercise and in a direction where I plan to post my observations on socially awkward situations that I encounter. The url of this blog is the result of a running joke...my most creative one ;), in that, I heard it on some stand-up comedy show, but forgot exactly who said it. I keep bumping into these people, mostly Chinese and East Asian friends, who ask me if there is a relation between the Native Indians of Americas and the "real" Indians. Ohh yeah, we are the REAL ones. After all the years of growing up learning how proud I should be, about my identity as an Indian, here I am telling people...OH, NO NO, you see...there are two kinds of Indians, the feather-type Indians who used to live in the Americas and who are almost extinct now, and the dot-type Indians who are way too many in number...