There was this popular you-tube video: this big tall guy walks around the city, around traffic signals, around apartments and commercial complexes with a humongous number of people on top of him and the background score goes on to say "I've got the whole world ... in my hands". For someone the likes of me who's hands go sore the moment I lift up my little nephew for more than a minute, bearing the weight of the whole world was a little next to being whimsical.

Anyway, that's not the point. I'm more intrigued by the "its a small world after all" anecdote. Its quite amazing when you realize it. Just like how your maid-servant effectively shrinks all your favorite dresses thanks to her fetish for strong detergents, the world apparently is shrinking in size, getting smaller as they rightfully say!

Information travels so fast these days ... its no more like how it was in the days of my grandfather ... someone dies and a telegram is sent out to everyone announcing 'someone's' death ... a telegram mostly brought bad news (we have a habit of writing the word 'safe' on the top-left corner of our postcard/inland letter meaning things are fine ... don't find the word and be ready for some death material). But quintessentially, the telegram would reach the recipient much much after the dead man has departed from earthly abode and traveled to the nether world to watch the item songs of Lord Indra's item girls (of course, if he's a sinner, he'll go to hell where apparently there are item songs but homosexuals dancing for them).

Today... with things like Google Wave, your recipients read as you type. Imagine how perilous this could be for us avid bloggers ... my readers would read things as I type and would immediately put up a spam filter against my email id.

And the funny side of it all is, it doesn't take a super cool gadget or a raging technology to shrink the world. In fact, all these gadgets and computers end up doing is shrink the world but expand the paunches of people (if I spent the same amount of time working out instead of blogging, Sylvester Stallone would bum out looking at me)

Listen to this:

A friend of mine finds a cat and gives it shelter - only to find out that it was her friend's cat and the cops are out there trying to locate the cat burglar!

8000 miles away from home, on an uninhabitable place, where graduate students fight out snow blizzards to go to lab meetings, in Pittsburgh, I find a school friend on an airport train!

My good ol' Mauritian friend happens to be a good ol' senior to my room mate in college too!

I meet this new engineering student in this god-forsaken country - he not only happens to be from Bangalore, but also from a college where my friends studied, and also is the third member in the trio where the remaining two are my own friends!

I meet the great Shivaram Karanth's nephew in a bus stop!

Most of all my friends here were in Bangalore traveling in and around my locality; I could never invite them home back then coz i didn't know them. I wouldn't be surprised if I have seen them before. Some faces seem SO familiar. The brain rings a bell but doesn't come out with anything to recall or remember!

A friend and me here belong to the same native place; there is an extremely strong possibility (i'd say 999 times out of 1000) that we are related to each other through someone!

My brother and sister-in-law were strangers until they met each other; their horoscopes were written by the same person - they were meant to match!

It was a shock to see people colonizing Pittsburgh in the first place; I then went on to discover that not only do my relatives stay here, one of them also works in our university as an assistant professor right above my previous lab and therefore is into cancer research - and also follows me to the biomedical science towers the moment I move into them!

And the grand finale...

I had a problem of dialing '988' instead of '998' when I key in a cell phone number on a land-line phone. Each time, it would reach an annoyed guy who had to SCREAM into my ears that I have dialed the wrong number again. Two years later, I was busy attending seminars after seminars on 'education in the US' and met a guy over food and generally discussed with him. 6 months later, from the US, I dial a number (supposed to be my uncle's) and I bungled again. This guy picks up, recognizes my voice and says "Ain't you the guy always trying to dial 998?" Later on, I learn that he was the same guy I had lunch with during the US seminars.

Its a small world after all...