Location, location, location...

“There is so much more to do in cyberspace than there is in the real world,” was my excuse to get out of the routine Friday evening happy hour at work. Despite my need for indulgence in some alcohol, finger-food and frivolous conversation at the end of a work week, my pretext was not totally unexpected on account of Bill Maher’s first reappearance post-vacation, not to mention the loner instincts that kicked in after I glanced at my ever-increasing pile of must-reads this morning. What was unexpected was my Jewish American (more American, less Jewish) co-worker’s repartee, “The question is which one is the real world.”

Needless to say that he is one of the few co-workers I have discussed Atlas Shrugged with at great length and whom I wouldn’t hesitate to go up to with a psycho-philosophical question in the middle of a work day without the fear of being received with an incredulous, open-mouthed stare. Even so, it took me by a certain degree of surprise.

With most people, conversation only goes as deep as that hail-mary 50-yard pass on a football field or cars buried in 2 feet of snow during a blizzard. For those that go through Lord of the Rings and Ayn Rand as required reading in high school, they seem to have an inexplicable fear of profound expression. I do somehow manage to get that kind of camaraderie from like-minded Indians, despite being a global citizen for the most part (by that, I mean, I can get just as excited by a perfectly tender piece of filet mignon as I can about pongal-vadai soaked in just the right amount of spicy sambhar, and could hold fanatical Hinduism to as much fault as I would Christianity).

But a few days ago, when I jumped up to high-five a fellow-hillbilly from the mountain state of Colorado on the simultaneous intoning of the best beer in the world – Fat tire for the uninitiated -- I realized jus how important geography can be. We then proceeded to wax nostalgic about the delightful crunch under our feet owing to the crisp white blanket so exclusive to Colorado-an blizzards, visibly bewildering the New Yorkers around us. That was the hard part -- cos while the Jack-Daniels-loving northeasterners might find it somewhere in their hearts to forgive you for your allegiance to unheard-of new Belgium brewery, they’re never going to be convinced that a winter that records an average daily temperature of 30°F could be tolerable, much less divine.

Since Colorado brings back some beautiful memories (graduation, sun-soaked summers, a bunch of incredibly amazing friends, bouldering on the foothills of the rockies, stables with white picket fences & camping amid the snow-capped mountains) needless to say, I was not thinking merely of shimmering dark brown ale or fresh flakes of snow. For a person that takes great pride in being able to suspend herself in cyberspace to make up for lack of profound conversation in real life, it came as a shock that geographical familiarity happens to matter a great deal!

Thanks to my fascination for that elusive mental wavelength match-up, to me, there is nothing that quite compares to finding a fellow Dan Brown enthusiast, someone that is as irreparably infected by the writing bug as I am, one that looks beyond the specious cyber hacker at the Baudrillard and Simulacra undertones in The Matrix, or a fellow human being that understands just why I had to skip a delightful night on the town to laugh at Maher’s New Rules.

However, sometimes there is nothing better than to sit down and have a hearty Wasn’t-that-café-on-Mulberry-Street-almost-divine? conversation with someone that has trod the same sand that you have, be it a decade in the past, a month ago or just some fleeting moments before.

Reason why I have spent many an hour swapping stories about those mystic tombs at the Lodhi Gardens in Delhi, the calm serenity of the Bay of Bengal on the fringes of Chennai’s Besant Nagar, the dangerously life-sapping (or life-giving as the case may be) crowds at Mumbai’s Victoria terminal, the Starbucks by the shimmering Hudson at Jersey’s Newport and that quaint little art shop in the quaint little town of Boulder, Colorado, only with the people that would truly understand – those that have been there, and done that.

The ones I call my ‘place-peers’ :)