Sharmila and I hail from Durgapur, a small town in India. There were two separate weddings we got invited to on the same day this weekend. Both of them were of kids of two friends of ours. One in Dallas and one in Atlanta. Both of them are also from the same small town of Durgapur. And get this… both their mothers and our mothers – all four of them were teachers in the same school!

Sharmila got to attend one of them and I attended the other one.

Funnily enough, at the wedding I attended (the Dallas one), I ran into a guy (Santanu) who was Sharmila’s classmate in engineering school and I further got introduced to his wife Tapasi. Who, we found out is the first cousin of our good friend (Sudipto) Ghose Sugo in Atlanta.

To roll back time a little, before I met Sudipto in Atlanta in 2007, I had actually first run into him in my senior year in residential school – way back in 1984. He was a junior in the same school and I used to meet him while visiting his roommate in his dorm. That other roommate was a junior of mine from Durgapur and we knew each other from the elementary school there.

To round up all the bizarre coincidences… that room mate junior I mentioned? Kuntal is his name and he lives in San Jose, California and yeah, he was also there in that wedding in Dallas!!

My friends from America are perfectly justified in thinking that it is a myth that India has 1.5 Billion people!!