What defines Chennai? What defines India?

Deep questions ... but a simple story ... In a recent stroll through Nishat Bagh in Srinagar, we came across a family with a small child wearing traditional pahadi clothes. While asking her grandfather if I could take her picture, we got to talking -- he told me they were visiting from Kargil and how he had had to abandon his house and village and flee when the Pakistanis started shelling his village ten years ago. पाकिस्तान कभी अमन नहीं चाहती was his conclusion. It was just in the last 3 years that he had started rebuilding his house and his life there.

He asked me where we were from. Finding out that we were from Chennai, his face lit up and he looked like he would hug me there and then. "You are from Dhoni's city! He is my favourite cricketer, and Chennai Super Kings is my favourite team". I tried to gently remind him that Dhoni was not quite from Chennai, but he waved it aside as an irrelevant detail. For him Chennai was Dhoni and Dhoni was Chennai.

What a strange country we live...and strange are the things that unite us -- cricket? Bollywood? food? perhaps all of these and some more...and I will have something to say about the last in a future post.