​He was a little boy nobody wanted.
 
His mother had died shortly after giving birth to him, probably from an undetected infection. Other boys gave him an ugly name in Creole that stamped him as a mother slayer. His father, who had never had a steady job, like many other men in Haiti, did odd jobs, carrying loads or painting houses. At other times, he was drunk and had little time for his son. He had two elder brothers who had left home early and lived in far-away Jérémie and Jacmel.
 
He could attend a missionary school for three years, only because they let him join without having to pay. Then his father pulled him out and put him to work, helping him repair a warehouse. Though he had done well in school, his father would not let him go back. When a teacher came to talk to him, his father was sniffing glue and virtually drove him out. After that he fed himself by doing chores for other people, mostly on his own, sometimes with his increasingly feeble father.

Then came the coup d’état of 1991, followed by the round-up of suspected supporters of the past president by the military or their henchmen. They were detained, beaten, sometimes killed. Large numbers of people tried to escape the island by leaving in overcrowded boats, among them some from the boy’s village. They invited him. He had nothing to run away from, for he had little to do with politics; but he had nothing to hold him back either, especially after his father coughed a bowlful of blood one morning and whimpered to his death. Early one morning he paid the meager fee and hopped on a boat.
 
It was a crude and flimsy boat, fair exchange for the paltry sum the boat-maker had been paid. It had hardly cleared Haitian waters when it disintegrated. Five children and two women drowned. The rest of the passengers were picked by a United States Coast Guard vessel and returned to Haiti.
 
At the Port au Prince dock, I was the first person to board the cutter. I kept a tab on human rights abuses in the US Embassy, and this was a part of my role. That is where, on the crowded deck of USCG Saratoga I met the boy for the first time. He gave his name as René, the name his mother had given him on her deathbed and nobody had ever used, not even his father. When I asked for his last name for my record, he pondered and said DeJean. I am sure it was a totally concocted name.
 
René had no political antecedents and did not qualify for refugee status. He fell out of my radar. Somehow the few words we had exchanged let me see a bright young boy, desperate for a way out of his obscure, miserable life, for whom I had nothing to offer. I went about my work, but his lean, eager face had left an imprint.

​Seven months later I flew to the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to interview Haitian migrants lodged there. I had finished talking to a group of Haitians and turned to return to my hotel, when a voice rang out, “Monsieur Nandy!” I looked back and, through the mist of a frantic, fast-changing past, the face of a boy stood out. Now the boy stood in front of me, in cleaner clothes, his hair combed, repeating his name, “René, René.”
 
I had seen and talked to scores of Haitian migrants meanwhile, but I had unaccountably remembered his name. I said truthfully, “René, I remember you.”
 
Dislodged from USCG Saratoga, René had stood in a line at the Haitian Port Police office for three hours and then detained for the night with two others while the rest were allowed to leave. The two were beaten and asked for information about activists, but René was taken to a different room for a different purpose: he was sodomized by the officer and then let go in the morning. It had taken him five months to gather some money and take a boat a second time, nearly reaching the Florida coast this time. He was picked up and brought to Guantanamo with other Haitians.
 
I asked him how did he know my name. He said he had heard the Coast Guard officer in USCG Saratoga address me. I was still curious and asked how he remembered it after so long. His answer broke my heart: he said I was the only person in his life who had ever spoken kindly to him.

​When I returned from Guantanamo, I talked with representatives of UNHCR and Save the Children foundation and pleaded with US authorities for humane treatment of orphans like René.
 
Nearly a year later I was talking with a Save the Children official and he mentioned the adoption of a Haitian child called René. By sheer coincidence, René appeared to have been adopted by a couple in Virginia, barely an hour’s drive from my home. I called the couple, explained my background and asked permission to talk to their adopted child. Instead they invited me for dinner.
 
When I parked the car and rang the bell, a pleasant-faced woman opened the door, and a joyous cry rang out as a young face appeared next to the woman, “Monsieur Nandy!”

​If a surgeon were to cut open my heart, he is likely to find three English letters inscribed on it: BNR. They don’t stand for the names of three beloved women, nor the initials of just one. I hate to dispel the patina of romance, but the letters refer to the Bengal Nagpur Railway. Why this pedestrian obsession with trains? Let me tell you why.
 
My parents had moved from Kolkata to Nagpur, where my father had found a job, and that is where I was born in Mure Memorial Hospital. They returned to Kolkata in a few years, but the link with Nagpur remained. My aunts stayed in Nagpur, where they had found jobs they liked. Stayed too a large number of close friends they had garnered in the city. So began our family’s steady patronage of the BNR, as my aunts visited us in Kolkata on every major vacation in central India and we visited them on every major holiday in eastern India.
 
We lived in a large house in northern Kolkata, at the junction of two major roads, Harrison Road, the main east-west thoroughfare, and College Street, the long corridor that ran north to south, changing names at intervals. From our home, it was a short hop to the Howrah rail station, whence BNR’s trains would take me to Nagpur.
 
Short, but eventful. Harrison Road was an incredibly crowded route, with trams, buses, cars, trucks, rickshaws, bullock carts, and thousands of pedestrians, not to mention beggars, sadhus, pickpockets and stray cows and mangy dogs. To negotiate the short distance from home to the rail station you needed to overcome Murphy’s Law: Anything that could go wrong, would. A heat-stroke victim, some broken truck, two colliding buses and their brawling conductors, clashing political processions, all could stop you in the track and make you miss your train.

Like everyone else, I arrived in the station an hour or two ahead of the time. A belated train meant even a longer wait. There was no reservation for the cheapest class of travel, the only class one could afford. You chose a sturdy porter, who could muscle his way to a compartment ahead of others, deposit your suitcase on the stuffed overhead bunk and occupy a seat, holding it for you until you wheedled your way through the crowd into the compartment, paid the enterprising porter his dues and replaced him on the seat. You were lucky if the overhead fan was whirring, for it was warm and muggy in the place where you sat.
 
A huge relief when the train started. There was a sudden puff of wind in the compartment, and the air got fresher and cooler as the train finally left the city and its crammed suburbs behind and slowly entered the countryside. I felt the wind stronger as I was fortunate to be in a seat next to the window. Keeping in mind my mother’s admonition, I kept my head turned in the direction of the wake, otherwise the wind would carry coal particles from the train’s boiler into my eyes. I felt a tinge of sadness, leaving Kolkata and my friends behind, but there was the compensating excitement of visiting a new city and new people.

The older man with a turban sitting next to me opened a small container and treated himself to some peanuts. Then he held it to me and said, “Have some, young man. It is good for you.” I was embarrassed but took a handful. Then he said, “I am just going up to Gonda. My son has just had a baby. He is coming to collect me.”
 
The couple sitting opposite was looking at us. The woman asked, “A boy or a girl?”
 
“A boy,” he said. “They say it looks like me. I am rather curious.”
 
The woman’s husband was middle-aged, with glasses and a small moustache. He was looking at me and said, “Aren’t you a little young to travel alone? Where are you going?”
 
I said, “My father brought me to the station in Kolkata. My aunt will receive me in Nagpur.” I didn’t want him to think my family didn’t take good care of me.
 
“Ah, you are going to Nagpur! We live in Nagpur. We came to Kolkata to visit our cousin.”
 
Then followed an animated conversation about Nagpur, the areas where we lived, the zoo I loved, the school where the man taught, the quiet charm of the city. Then the man in the blue jacket, sitting in a corner and reading a newspaper, spoke up and said that he had also visited Nagpur and was going there for a meeting.
 
Soon the compartment was buzzing; everybody seemed to be talking about something or other. A roomful of unfamiliar people had started exchanging their views about cities, jobs, markets and relations. Even the young woman sitting in the other corner, who had so far kept modestly silent, spoke up and said she studied in the Hislop College and loved the hostel she lived in and her friends there.

​This was a true microcosm of India. The train, with the transience of forced company, had converted a bunch of strangers into a convivial group talking about their friends and families. By the time it got late, people were even sharing snacks and blankets. I looked out of the window at the villages whizzing past in the gathering dusk and thought of my aunts and their loving faces.
 
A month later BNR brought me back to Kolkata and the arms of my father and mother. Mother kissed me openly to my embarrassment, and father hugged me and said he had missed me.
 
Years later, when work or vacation took me to Europe, I sometimes used their clean, comfortable trains that took me swiftly from one place to another.
 
In the US now, though I mostly use the plane to go places, I sometimes take Amtrak trains to New York and luxuriate in its plush seats. Occasionally I even use their ‘quiet’ compartment to read books and do my work.
 
I must be honest and tell you: I haven’t yet seen anything that has a patch on the BNR I knew.

My first clue that I wasn’t a normal person came early. When I was in high school.
 
A book had been going from hand to hand among my classmates. Dip had purloined it from his uncle’s library, on the advice of his cousin, the uncle’s son, who hadn’t read it himself, but had heard his parents’ friends discuss it in whispers as a ‘hot book.’ Our classmates had formed a line for the book, in the order of their ranking in Dip’s esteem, and my turn came toward the very end.

I got the book on a Saturday, and had a weekend to relish the ‘hot’ passages. Dip had given it an extra cover to hide its identity and surreptitiously passed it to me, like James Bond sharing a nuclear code, with the superfluous advice, “Take good care of it.” I placed it in my ragged school bag and took it home as if it was the Kohinoor.
 
I dared bring it out after my parents had gone to bed. The original cover showed a long-haired busty woman in a skimpy purple dress, a side slit displaying her long leg and left thigh. The title was The Woman of Rome and the author was Alberto Moravia. I had never heard of Moravia and started the book with the sole anticipation of soon encountering the ‘hot’ passages my classmates had been talking about.
 
Moravia had other things in mind for me. Or so it seemed. He was a master story teller and, in a few moments, he had me fully under his spell. Forgotten was the reason why I had been given the book and, to be honest, why I was reading the book. I felt drawn over the pages by an irresistible force until I had finished the book. It kept its spell over me for hours. At the dinner table, where we had the egalitarian practice of sharing all our experiences of the day, I even told my parents of the book I had read and how it had affected me.
 
Sure, the book had erotic passages and sexual episodes in the life of the protagonist, Adriana, a hooker’s daughter who is forced to turn tricks also. But these were so embedded in the flow of the story, so integral to the stream of events in the fascist ambience of Mussolini’s Italy, that they went by me with the merest of murmur. Not just Adriana, but Astarita the obsessed cop, Giacomo the disloyal revolutionary and
Sonzogno, the brutal, possessive felon mesmerized me. I felt I was walking the broad stradas and narrow streets of Rome alongside the irresistible Adriana and sensing her tension, thrill and despair.

​The moment I entered the school Monday morning Dip and three classmates cornered me.
 
“Read it?” They asked, hoping to initiate a salacious discussion on the ‘hot’ book.
 
“Yes,” I said, in absolute honesty, “it is a fascinating book.”
 
“Fascinating? What are you talking about?” Dip said in confusion.
 
“It is a remarkable story. I was deeply moved.”
 
Dip was as deeply disgusted. He nearly spat the words, “Who cares about the story! I give you the hottest book in the world, the book every fellow wants to read, and you give us this crap about being moved. Tell us what else moved.” He made a suggestive gesture with his finger.
 
I decided to be high-minded and ignore the sign. I said, “I appreciate your lending me the book. I loved reading it. It is an amazing story of a woman who had nothing going for her. She was a prostitute’s unwanted but pretty daughter. But she found –”
 
Dip stopped me with an impatient gesture. The other three had already made some guttural sounds indicating their disapproval or, at least, bewilderment.
 
“Did you or did you not read the good stuff in that book? Did you have some excitement –”
 
It was my turn to stop him with a hand gesture.
 
“Yes, of course, I read the good stuff. It is very good. I couldn’t take my eyes off the book. I was quite spellbound.”
 
Now I had their attention. They wanted to hear more.
 
I resumed, “It is really a fantastic book. It is fantastic because Adriana to me as real as anyone I know. I know nothing of Rome and I have nothing in common with a streetwalker, and yet I felt closer to Adriana than any of you. She can sleep with dozens of men and enjoy it, but to me she is a woman of gold. I adore her.”
 
Dip looked like he was going to faint. The rest did not say a word, and departed with the book, mystified beyond words. In my entire class, I swiftly gained a reputation for being very abnormal.

The event had a weird sequel.
 
I was so moved by Moravia’s story that I wrote a piece on it. The school magazine refused to publish an article on some prostitute’s tale, but an enthusiastic classmate put it up in a wallpaper students ran. By a sheer coincidence, Dip’s uncle, while visiting the school, glimpsed the article and searched for the book back home. Not finding it, he asked his son to look for it. The son had no option but to retrieve the precious book from Dip and return it to his father’s library, pretending to have found it.
 
Then, most astonishingly, the uncle, a hard-nosed civil engineer, whose friends had referred to the novel as a ‘hot book,’ told his son, “It is a wonderful novel. You should read it.” Clearly, the man we all assumed to be normal, familiar with nuts and bolts, was a wee bit abnormal too.

I have never been a full-time teacher, though I have lectured and taught courses in several universities, from Washington to New Delhi, Abu Dhabi to Geneva. But for three years my principal work was teaching, in a university and an international management institute, and consulting had to take a back seat.

In our family, teaching was an admired job, perhaps because both our parents had taught before they graduated to administrative work. They cared a lot about how their son was being taught in school. Our dinner table was a highly democratic affair, where father talked about a light-fingered clerk in his office, mother talked about the new student who talked to her in Bahasa, and then I was expected to tell them of my instant enlightenment in the school. What made it tougher was the presence of intimidating guests, like some white-haired judge or mildly inebriated journalist, that made me search harder for something interesting to share.
 
I could not naturally talk about the plump girl in the neighboring window about whom all my classmates had written poems or the revealing pictures one ingenious classmate shared from his elder brother’s Playboy collection. I soon learned the trick of converting some minor event into a problem and presenting it as an issue to the table. When one teacher, for example, had pulled a student’s ear, I narrated it and then quickly turned it into a leading question: Is corporal punishment a good idea?
 
However ineptly I did it, the talk promptly snowballed into a lively discussion. Father was a soft-spoken man, but I was surprised to find he had strong views on what is good or bad in teaching. Mother had the misleading mien of the classic Asian woman, terminally polite and seemingly diffident, but I knew she had a mind brisk as a bee and tough as tungsten. The guests waded in, often with wit and verve. The resulting debate was my first initiation into the miracle that teaching can sometimes be and the disaster that it mostly is. It was the first clue to what teaching should really be.

Yes, teaching can be a miracle. It can be the spark to a flame that consumes your life, a passion to learn, to master a subject so well that you develop a view of your own. Or even an insight that unravels what was not known before. Or become the basis for creating something new, something beautiful. But most of the time it is the dull dishing of data. Or a boring recitation of facts and analyses that you could have gathered from print.
 
When I look back on my days in school, college and universities, even doctoral work, it seems like a desert. I have learned little – nothing that I could not have learned quicker and better by simply reading good books that existed even then. And taking the help of tools and technology that exist today. By and large, schools and colleges use primitive methods and outdated tools to teach indifferent students mostly things that would be of no earthly use to them later on, except occasionally to get a job by waving a worthless certificate.
 
Didn’t I learn anything in school or college? I did, principally by pursuing my own interests in my own way. Often by ignoring or defying what I was being told. Languages and literature are a prime example. The teaching of language in most schools is a monstrous waste of time. The proof of that is abysmal quality of language in Facebook, in business, in the daily transactions of life. It has neither precision nor elegance. Practically everybody learns a foreign language or two while growing up or later; practically nobody remembers more than a word or two after a few years, except the few who travel a lot, live abroad or earn their bread by using a foreign language. The enormity of the waste, of time and money, is simply staggering.

​Of course, I developed my interests by watching the model of my father, my mother and my elder brother. They all read, they all pursued their interests. They were in effect the true teachers of my life. I was lucky. They were kind and gracious. They encouraged me. They helped me in every way they could. It also helped, especially as I grew up in a middle-class family in a poor country, that my father had a job that broadened my access to books, magazines, public lectures, art and performance. Teaching had nothing to do with it. I learned poetry by hearing good recitations by poets and actors: Dylan Thomas reading his own poems and Richard Burton reading John Donne. I learned Shakespeare by watching Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles.
 
The first day I attended a class in Logic in my college, I went to a café afterward with six friends. They all agreed that the class was a total waste of time. They had learned nothing useful and, from what the professor said about future lessons, they expected to learn nothing useful from future classes. When I disagreed, they asked me to explain why. In response, I went over the subject taught in the class, linking it to their experience and emphasizing its use and significance. At the end, they all agreed that logic was worth learning and said, “You taught better than the damned professor.” From then on, after every class in logic, I re-taught the same class with the six in the same café. I had taken the first step in teaching.
 
Eventually I taught for sixteen years, invariably as a visiting or adjunct professor, alongside my work as an executive and later as a diplomat. I taught in many countries of Asia and some countries of Europe and the Middle East. I went by a simple guiding principle. People learn only when they want to learn and exert to learn. The teacher’s only job to create the motivation for that desire and exertion. I came to a nihilistic conclusion: There is really no such thing as teaching. There is only learning. The teacher’s only role is to help the student learn in his or her own way. Students’ ways are invariably varied. So must be the ways the teacher has to help, responding flexibly and empathetically to each student.
 
If that sounds like an impossible role, so be it. Man or woman, the teacher has to be Superman. I know of no more insightful claim than that of Maria Montessori, “My students work as if I don’t exist.”

​Seven minutes from where I lived in Haiti, there was a bakery called Boulangerie Christophe in a charming two-story house in Pétionville.
 
It wasn’t a very old house, yet it had an old-world charm. It displayed a large open front on the ground floor, leading to an extended hall, created possibly by joining two or three rooms. That served as the main room of the bakery, with a few tables and chairs on one side where customers could sit, and the sales counter on the other side with a display of the products. There was an extended room at the back where the baking was done and a smaller room on the side where both the raw materials and some additional products were stored.

I got to see all those rooms only because the proprietor, Yolette Carvonis, took me around and explained how a bakery functions. I had started my life in a huge tire factory and my inclination was to see it as a manufacturing process. As she described how it all worked, I created a work flow chart in my mind. As she waxed passionate and spoke of the care she took to get the right ingredients, even in the disturbed situation in the country, I began to see something more.
 
More than the science, there was an art to the business of baking. You have to love what you are doing. You have to believe that quality matters. It did not matter that only a small number of people in a poor country could afford to buy your products. What mattered was how they enjoyed what you made. What mattered even more how much you enjoyed making them. Yolette loved making her bread, cakes, pastries and assorted cookies. She showed me her designs and the French design books from which she took her inspiration. She thought of herself as an artist and I agreed with her. Nobody in their right mind would think of her as anything else.
 
It took me a while to strike friendship with her. I thought of a bakery as a place where you bought a few things and got out quickly. Yolette’s husband, Michel, changed that. The third Sunday I visited Boulangerie Christophe, he appraised me with a curious eye as he packed my purchases.
 
“You were here last Sunday?” he asked with a smile.
 
“And the Sunday before that,” I replied.
 
It was an early hour and there wasn’t a crowd yet. He finished packing and said, “Why don’t we have some coffee?”
 
We repaired to a corner table and he graciously pulled out a chair for me.

“You are new to Haiti?”

​“Is it that obvious?” I laughed and said, “I just came a month back. I am still finding my feet. A friend recommended your bakery.”
 
“I am glad to hear that.”
 
“He said that all our Embassy colleagues buy from you. I asked because my daughter’s birthday is next month, and I will need a birthday cake.”
 
“We will be glad to make it for you. Just tell us what kind of cake she would like and what words you would like on the cake.”
 
“I will talk to her and get those to you in time. Your coffee is excellent, I must say.”
 
“In Haiti, we roast the coffee beans in a very special way. I am happy that you like it,” Michel said, and ordered another round of coffee for us.
 
Then he said, “As you are new here, let me say this. You will find that people react to Haiti in two ways. Either they loathe it and loathe it greatly. Or they love it and love it a lot. There seems to be no middle ground.”
 
I told him that I had read something similar in Herbert Gold’s book about the country. “I have been in Haiti barely a month, but I seem to like it. It has a fascinating history and the people are warm. I expect to like it more and more.”
 
He introduced me to his wife, Yolette, and mentioned my birthday cake. I thanked them both and left.

​A trip to Boulangerie Christophe became a routine every Sunday morning. I invariably returned with a large box of croissants au beurre and croissants aux amandes, my favorites, and other delicacies for the children or our guests. With each trip our friendship grew and I came to know, not only the Carvonis couple, but most of their family members little by little.
 
Yolette’s brother was a general in the Haitian army and a member of the junta then ruling the country, after a coup d’état to dislodge the democratically elected President. Also, the Carvonis were related by marriage to a major business family that had financed the coup. They too came to know quickly that I was in the country to negotiate the end of the junta’s rule and the return of the President to power. Doubtless they had misgivings about my mission, but our friendship endured and flourished. Together we explored the best restaurants of Port au Prince and went to dance the meringue in the lively nightclubs of Pétionville.
 
Eight months later, after negotiations had failed and US marines had taken over the country, the President was returned to power and the military junta went back to the barracks. My mission had ended, and I was to return to Washington. The last Sunday I did not visit the bakery, for I had to supervise the packing of household goods.
 
To my surprise Michel and Yolette turned up with a large box of croissants aux amandes. They knew just what I loved with my coffee. When they were leaving, I came out to see them off and their chauffeur brought out two huge cartons of Haitian specially-roasted coffee. The Carvonis didn’t want me to miss my cherished flavor even in Washington.

For years I drove Mercedes cars. They were good cars and needed no attention from me, which qualified for my unqualified affection. In the rare case something went wrong, Mercedes service was impeccable in many countries. That was important in my itinerant life style. It was also a practical choice: when I left a country after three years, a Mercedes car sold quickly at a good price.

When I was in Manila, on an impulse I ordered a souped-up sporty BMW. I loved driving it. But it drew a phenomenal amount of attention that I found exasperating. It reached a limit when a colleague introduced me to an awe-struck visitor as “Mr. BMW.” I thought that was the kind of branding I could do without. I did not buy another BMW in the following twenty years.
 
Marketing people talk excitedly about branding. How important it is to secure a share of the market for a product. Since we are now inclined to speak of people as products too, it is to be expected that we should talk of branding of people too. We may not all be very special, but we are all specialists now. One is not a banker, one is an investment banker. One is not a doctor, one is a gynecologist. Once there are enough investment bankers and gynecologists, I am sure pioneering bankers and doctors will develop further sub-specialties and promptly brand themselves with a new name. Our role will be to stand in awe of the new sub-specialty and rush to use its service.
 
Of course it is useful to know what other people do. You can take their help when you need it. That is why society initiated a branding system. When you have a problem in your bathroom, you call a plumber. But it is a bad plumber who not only fixes your leaking faucet, but also tries to fix a leaking roof instead of telling you to get a roofing specialist. It is the problem of a specialist who does not know the limit of his specialization. The other problem is the problem of the specialist who draws the limit too closely, echoing Voltaire’s laughable eye specialist who is a specialist of the left eye only.
 
By then it is not society’s useful branding, it is our branding of ourselves.
 
In school I had a friend in our class, Jay, who had a way of telling jokes. We enjoyed and laughed at his jokes. He continued to tell his jokes. Later, as we graduated to other classes, he remained a fount of jokes and became informally crowned as the clown of the class. I met him five years later, among other friends, and was surprised to see him persisting in his role as the joker. I wondered if he would ever break out of that role and try something different. He had branded himself too indelibly to change.
 
Early success can be pleasing, but it can also become a fetter. It may stop us from seeing beyond the comfort of what we do easily and well, and try something that has the potential of far greater accomplishment and, just as important, far greater satisfaction. I suppose it is not just success but also failure that can influence us strongly. When I was young, I was painfully shy and had difficulty, when asked, even to say my name. I saw how people reacted to my mumbling, how quickly they turned away and lost interest in what I had to say. I struggled to overcome what at one point seemed to me an inherent handicap and took an inordinate interest in public speaking. Soon I was speaking in college and university debates and, by most accounts, excelling. My later work involved a large amount of public seminars, key briefings and even press conferences. I seemed to draw adrenalin from larger crowds. I am glad I have stopped in order to try other things. 

​Have you ever seen an animal branded? The animal is roped, brought down, its legs tied and a huge hot iron, with the owner’s initial or mark, is applied to its back or side. Some owners don’t want to spoil the skin, which can be sold at a good price, and apply the iron to the animal’s face. If you think this is harsh, you should view the alternatives: branding with corrosive chemicals, freeze branding with liquid nitrogen or cartilage branding by mutilating the animal’s ears.
 
Starting with Egyptians four thousand years back, we have branded animals -- cows, horses, mules, buffaloes, even sheep and goats – to display the glory of ownership. The very word brand comes from the same source as fire. We have branded baby calves and colts, before they were weaned, because owners thought they would be easier to handle. By any standard, it is an unspeakably cruel and offensive practice.
 
There must be few things sadder than when we choose to brand ourselves and imprison our free selves in the cage of a concept. Like Chinese women, whose feet were tightly bandaged from young days so that they could have beautiful small feet, we adapt to the shackles of our own idea, adopt a new persona and strive to make a reality out of an illusion. It is no less cruel than what we have been doing to the animals.

This is a mystery.
 
I don’t know her. I have never known her. I have no idea how she looks or what she does. I have certainly never met her.
 
I get messages on the internet from her and, as I do with everybody, I reply. I say whatever seems right.
 
Following up on the exchange of messages, we now periodically speak to each other. The internet provides a myriad means of doing so conveniently and economically. So we do.
 
I took a look at our exchanged messages. We began as strangers begin, grasping for straws of common interest. We proceeded, as strangers proceed, by building on the few strands of shared knowledge. As days passed, we felt more comfortable and spoke more easily of ourselves. Yet we seem to have respected the cardinal, unwritten rule of the internet: Don’t ask too much, certainly not too soon.
 
I am less sure of what we have talked about. I know that she has been scrupulously considerate and never asked what I would have to ponder before disclosing. I hope I haven’t been presumptuous and probed where I shouldn’t have ventured. I know I am as curious as the next person, but I have learned it is not worth asking something that the other person has not disclosed on her own.
 
So you will possibly be shocked to know what I don’t know about her. It is just about outrageous what she does not know about me. Yet the fact remains she is vitally important to me. There would be a big hole in my life if she weren’t in it. I also flatter myself that I mean something to her.
 
It has suddenly occurred to me that there is something gross about the way we gain people in our lives. We usually meet them, physically. We see them first, often we know a lot about them readily: where they live, what they do for a living, how they live and with whom. Often we talk to them to fill in the other details: what they care for, what has happened to them, what would they like to do, what do they believe. All this before a relationship can begin.
 
Maybe our relationship, even with people we think we care for, are based on this large factual basis of who we think they are. Isn’t there a streak of vulgarity in this motive-laden way of building a relationship? Isn’t there a narcissistic bias in that probe-and-build style of developing a personal nexus?

Technology has suddenly given us a way to create a link with a person without knowing anything about her. In this vacuum there surely lurks the danger of falsehood and deception, as there is in walking into an unknown penumbral zone. But there is also the breathtaking prospect of discovering unexpected gold. There is a special beauty in discovering a person, as the person is, without attributing special virtues or vices, depending on your prior experience with an engineer, a veterinarian, a government clerk or a journalist. Maybe for the first time, you see a person as a person, shorn of expected features, just a human being, who lives, loves, revels and suffers just like you. I don’t know about you, but it certainly gives me a thrill.
 
“How are you?” starts a typical call.
 
“I am much better than yesterday, when you didn’t call,” I respond.
 
“I was quite busy. I had to run a number of errands. Two banks took a long time.”
 
“If you are spending that much time in banks, one may guess – enviously – you have a lot of money on your hands.”
 
“Not at all. The long lines were the problem. It wasn’t that bad. In one bank at least the people were rather gracious.”
 
“You are lucky then. The bankers I encounter are very somber and sullen people.”
 
“You should try smiling at them. I do.”
 
“If you were the banker, I certainly would. All my banking is sadly online.”
 
This is the kind of insignificant palaver we often exchange.
 
Then, again, she might say, “I miss my dad.”
 
“Tell me why.”
 
“He always wanted me to learn things, be worldly-wise and self-sufficient. I miss his concern.”
 
“That’s a lovely memory to fall back on. It is sad you don’t have him. But you have some good memories to recall when you are lonely.”
 
“Yes, I have some good memories.”
 
“I too miss my dad, particularly when I travel.”
 
“How is that?”
 
“He liked to travel. Every time I go to a new place that I like, I wish he were with me to share the experience.”

​That is how it goes, from the trivial to the nearly sublime. It really does not matter what we talk about, I feel she listens to me. Even more, I feel she wants to hear me and understand what I am feeling. That is a very reassuring feeling.
 
We live in a world that does not always feel very sympathetic. It feels like, as Camus’s Meursault felt, a place of benign indifference. So it feels good to have a faceless friend out there in the universe, a benign interlocutor who is not indifferent, who cares in a quiet way, hears me seamlessly and tells me, in effect, that I matter.
 
So here is a tribute to you, my friend: You mean more to me than you know. Your words are kind, your thoughts are generous, your presence is a balm, your easy laughter – that silver cascade of sheer happiness – a joy for ever. Stay with me, like a perennial rainbow, and add color to the white and gray of my chores and charges. Just stay with me.

We move a lot these days, and often beyond the borders of our countries. We need visas to do it. Mostly we need visas for short periods, known as nonimmigrant visas.
 
For a while I acted as a consul issuing such visas for the US in a poor country. It was quite an experience. People needed visas to enter the US to study, invest, receive training, transfer to a related company, transit to another country, be a part of a sports team or an entertainment group, do temporary work and most of all visit for pleasure, business or a combination of both.
 
Some were savvy or had past experience. They gave crisp replies, presented relevant data or documents. Most had no idea and came with vacuous dreams or half-baked ideas. When they came for an ‘interview,’ they possibly expected a leisurely chat. They were taken aback to talk to a grim-faced interviewer, standing, through a thick plate of glass. They were discomfited by the direct, brusque style of the consular officer, eager to get it over in two minutes or less.

When they said they wanted to study business administration in the US, they often could not say why they wanted to study the subject, let alone why in the US where it was expensive. If they claimed a business purpose, such as exports, they could not say how they planned to promote exports or which US companies they targeted. Even if it was just a pleasure trip, they had a hard time giving specifics of what they were going to see or do.
 
Many had curious assumptions about the procedure. Some assumed that the result depended on the consular officer or his mood. If rejected by one, they wished to try their luck with another officer or even another consulate, overlooking that all officers go by the same guidelines. A rejection was marked on the passport and the next officer would check the record. Some went to the length of getting a new passport, but the centralized record still showed the earlier rejection. Then there were the gullibles who trusted con artists among travel agents who promised fast processing and good results.

I sometimes felt sorry for the people who applied. They paid a lot for their applications to be processed, not to mention the huge time and effort they devoted to the act. Even when they got the visa, they often felt ill treated. Those who did not, were often mystified – a reason they wanted to try their luck again, essentially wasting their labor and money. No question that among the rejected were some who deserved a visa, who could not articulate their case quickly and well, and were shunted cavalierly aside.
 
I was, of course, on the other side, in the role of what ex-president George Bush called “the decider.” I sat on a high stool, on the other side of a thick glass divider, settling in minutes the fate of an applicant. I felt humble and uncomfortable in that role, knowing what I did not know about the person standing before me in hope and trepidation, and pretending to a certainty about my decision that I did not feel.
 
It did not help ease my discomfort that the other consular officers I knew were quite comfortable taking swift decisions and invincibly certain that their decisions were perfect. Most seemed to think the entire world was trying to gatecrash into the US, and it fell to them to resist those barbarians. Poorer people, which meant most people from poorer countries, would lie, cheat and dissemble to enter the US and, once in, would never leave. They should keep saying No until they encountered the rare case where they had to say Yes.

The US Congress had laid the basis of that reaction when it decreed that anyone who applied for a nonimmigrant visa would be assumed to be an intending immigrant. The arrogant decree presumes the US to be the El Dorado where everyone in the world is trying to trespass. If a Japanese says he wants to see Disneyland or a cancer-stricken Peruvian to consult Sloan-Kettering, the presumption a US consul should start with is that he or she is feigning that interest to get into Los Angeles or New York – and stay there.
 
With this perverse presumption, if you want a nonimmigrant visa to the US you must prove what is impossible to prove: the negative proposition that one has no intention to stay on in the US. It is expressed of course in more plausible-sounding words: you must demonstrate links that will compel your return to your home country. It is in fact the basis on which a vast number of applications are denied.

​Yet one has only to ponder the criterion for a moment to realize how laughable it is. What links can compel a return of the native? A wife and children, followed by old parents and siblings, seem most probable. Wrong. Thousands from poor countries live in exile for years; they feel they do better for their loved one by sending them money from abroad, rather than starve with them at home. A longing for one’s relatives, community or homeland may be real, but are hardly compelling, given the prospect of penury or violence.
 
If social circumstances are not compelling, far less are the economic circumstances. An executive in Chandigarh can earn more as a clerk in Chicago, a nurse in Colombo can do better as domestic caregiver in Columbus. A decent job in homeland is no incentive for a hurried return. A large bank balance is easily faked; short loans from friends and relations are easily obtained. A large house does not mean the owner will return to it; it can be easily sold in absentia and the money transmitted abroad. The compelling circumstances consuls delve into, the sheaves of documents they collect as evidence of domestic ties are no more than a joke, ridiculous makework to display consular diligence rather than a reliable indicator of who will return home after a US visit.
 
Fortunately, issuing visas was a small and very temporary part of my work. It remains a telling reminder of how a country, especially a rich and powerful country, can remain oblivious to social and cultural aspects of other countries. In the process, it continues with a system that neither serves its purposes nor creates friends or friendly repercussions abroad.