Due to a fuck-up with the university's escort service, I was left out in the cold at 1 in the night and not wanting to wait another hour or so, or walk in the -10F cold, I decided to take a cab. Now I am used to inane chatter with cabbies but this one turned out to be different. After getting where I wanted to go and how, he suddenly asks me, "Do you know Maxwell?".
I am like "Maxwell who".
"Maxwell of the equations"
"Of course, how do you know him?"
"Same way as you know him"
For a moment I wonder if he's a physics PhD, I have run into them at strange places but then he smiles and says he is trying to get to be a radiology tech or something but he needs to save up money before he can do that. Then he asks me if I am from Bombay. This is uncannily accurate, though it may just be that that's the only city in India he knew. (He said he is from Mauritania). So I asked him if he watched Hindi movies. And he sang a few songs from some 90's movies surprisingly fluently but with a little accent. Turned out that he couldn't understand them much, but he had enough of a memory to remember them verbatim. He asked me about my research and then he said he had studied a little programming. He asked me if I was married, and I was like, is this a extended pickup attempt, but then he said that he was (after I told him I wasn't), and his wife also wanted to study more so they were delaying kids. And that was when we reached my home.
All in all, the conversation left me a little sad. The guy seemed overtly happy and funny, but there was something a little forced about it. It was as if he was a disappointed at where he found himself at that juncture in life. And then I thought about the kids I teach who smetimes want to know how every little equation they know is going to help them be a lawyer or whatever and it depressed me further thinking how vast the difference in opportunities could be just depending on where you happen to be born and to whom.
