Small Worlds

We had tea and dessert with our neighbors the other night. (The occasion? Admiring their new big screen TV! Poor Mike -- temptation is everywhere.)

It turns out that their house was previously owned by another social psychologist who used to be in my department (and indeed, graduated from my same graduate program, and -- although he doesn't know it -- was the first one to tell me that I'd gotten the job here.) I knew he'd lived on this street, but didn't know which house, so it was funny to find out after all these years of knowing them (our current neighbors). What a coincidence!

We also chatted with them about the movie Slumdog Millionaire. They had a totally different perspective on it from growing up in India. For us, it was kind of this exotic window into a different place, and for them, it was remembering what it was like (though neither one of them grew up in either Mumbai or the slums). There's one scene in the movie -- stop here if you don't want to hear anything about the plot -- where one of the characters jumps in a pool of excrement to get an autograph from his favorite movie star. We didn't know this, but apparently the guy in the movie actually was a huge star in India. Sridhar said, "Every single kid I knew would have done exactly the same thing!"