its a small world

so A and i were talking the other day, and i mentioned my old friend B, and how i recently got back in touch with him. he's moving to houston, and was had asked me to come visit him once he set up his place, and then all of a sudden A asks, "is this B who studied at so-and-so college?" so, it turned out it was the same person. that is not surprising. what is is that A has never been to india and his only knowledge of india is through scattered relatives. turned out that one of his friends met B while B was doing a summer project in spain. A met B at heathrow airport of all places, and they exchanged messenger ids and that was that.

but that wasnt the end of it. i probed a little more and i found that A knows a whole bunch of B's friend, or at least has heard of them, and i know many of them too. and i was thinking how is it that in a country so huge, you still can always find people who know people who you know. but then i realized that all the indians here are from a handful of cities and maybe 20 colleges. in fact, theres only some 40 or 50 schools from which they come from. its really scary to know how incredibly small "our kind" of indians are relative to the country as a whole. and its true, no matter what group we talk of, no matter how many we are, we are just a miniscule proportion of the whole country.

and this reminded me of why i dont like stargazing. just a little bit and i realize how tiny the earth is in the universe, and how tiny i am on earth. the idea that my living or not couldnt make any difference to anyone at all makes me quite depressed.

this wasnt much of a post, but i just felt like saying something. blah!