…if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. — E M Forster

I am not proud of being an Indian. I did nothing to merit Indian-ness. I didn’t choose to be born in India. I do feel very fortunate to belong to this great melting pot of cultures and influences, but that’s just about all. Nationality — mine, yours or anyone else’s — is a matter of chance and it would speak poorly of me if I were proud of a coincidence.

I am an Oriya. Which is another way of saying that I hail from the south-eastern Indian state of Orissa. You might remember it from news footage of 1999 when a super cyclone killed thousands there. Lately it has jumped in and out of news because of a six-year-old marathon runner, a sicko (with whom I share my second name) who raped a German tourist, and a regular starvation death story that is never far from the surface.

Over the last week, I have been having an e-mail conversation with a college friend on the nature of faith and inspiration. It boiled down to the strength (or lack of it) of one’s faith. I am not a faithful, being inclined towards the skeptic’s ways. I call myself an agnostic, which puts me in the enviable position of being able to claim all faiths as mine and to question and dissect them as and when I want.

At about ten in the night on Saturday, I was at Carter Road, Bandra, swaying in the sea wind and telling my friends how my day went. I mentioned the bloggers’ meet (but naturally).

“Who all came?” asked one.

“Well there was Amit Varma, Sakshi Juneja, Akshay Mahajan and others.” I tentatively pull out the attendance sheet (my gift, my burden) from my pocket and hold it open for them to see. No effect.

“Who are they?”

I begin to wonder if we shouldn’t start talking about the quality of the dosa we were stuffing our mouths with.

Hear one, hear all! All ye who read this blog (yes, all three of you)… it is that time of the month again.

A bloggers’ meet is coming. It falls this Saturday, that is on April 29, at 4 pm at the Regal Barista on Colaba Causeway.

If you are a wannabe like me and wish to suck up to the likes of Amit Varma and Yazad Jal, be there. It will be good to see other wannabes.

Update: Dang! Couldn’t make it.

Hmmm… Let’s see. I got a comment on the previous to previous post from a certain someone I knew in Chennai. I deleted it because it was off-topic. He commented however, as an employee of a dotcom that features and encourages creative writing. He was wondering if their site could have a parallel version of mypajama.com running on their servers. I had my reasons so I said no (I mailed him back because he was decent in his comment and had requested for a reply.) and forgot about it.