Talking Politics, Mr. Tambourine Man

Today I had the amazing fortune to tag along with Becky on another journey across India to meet more members of her new extended family: this time in our own back yard, Gurgaon. We left with our cab driver Amit and drove about 10 minutes to Sector 31 where we met Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. Though Becky has explained the relation to me twice now, I'm still a bit confused about the specifics as to how she will become related to him. That aside, we had a delightful time talking to Paranjoy. He's an accomplished professor, author and journalist. In excellent English he went to some trouble to describe to us the political system in India (the largest democracy in the world with 1.1 billion people), the changing face of India (increasing literacy, decreasing poverty and increasing newspaper readership as a result) and his opinions on a number of recent political events such as the recent "shoe incident" during the elections http://www.panthic.org/news/129/ARTICLE/4919/2009-04-17.html.

When speaking with him, I was struck by not only his scholarly brilliance (as he quoted politicians, cited various statistics and referenced major historical events) but also by his compassion for those around him. As we sat in the living room, he alternated bouncing his 5 year old son on his lap, dancing with his 7 year old daughter to the tune of the cassette playing in surround sound and educating Becky and I on the world we had now found ourselves in.

Though I could have sat there all day, eventually more family members arrived and we broke for lunch. We had sushi at a delicious Japanese place just across town. After some prawns, veggies, pork dumplings and rice we headed back to Paranjoy's place where Anshuman (who we'd stayed with in Hong Kong) played some Dylan tunes on his acoustic guitar while Paranjoy played the harmonica and Becky and I sang.

Before long, Paranjoy rushed off to Delhi to tie things up at the office, Anshuman to meet with his new girl "friend", and I was left to think about how lucky I was to have had such a wonderful Saturday afternoon in a small, cool living room, away from the heat, chorus of honking and general chaos outside on the streets of Gurgaon.