Two Degrees of Separation

This was published on 28 Aug 20o5 in the Mumbai Mirror and on my site www.manfrommatunga.com. Here is the archive link.

A decade ago, we were visiting my wife’s cousin in Chicago. A young man had come in from Idaho to “see” her, after having passed her first two tests of being Jain and vegetarian. After we were introduced, he mentioned his cousin sisters who lived in Jain Society in Sion. As it happened, they had studied in J B Vaccha and my wife happened to know them reasonably well. For the next two hours, the whole topic of conversation revolved around Sion, Matunga and common friends. The cousin felt completely left out, since she had no clue what we were talking about, and kept getting more and more irritated as time went by. The next day, she just blew the poor guy off!

As a kid, whenever I used to go to Matheran or Mahabaleshwar during Diwali or summer, the common refrain from my parents was, “Half of Matunga is here”! And typically during the evening stroll through the market-place, we would meet someone who was a familiar face for my Mom either from the bhaji-market, or the derasar, or Don Bosco or Auxilium (my sister’s school). As if that was not enough, more often than not, the next-door neighbor at Rugby or Fountain would either be from Matunga, or had in-laws living in Matunga, or had once lived in Matunga or was hoping to shift to Matunga… there was always a connection. 

I have almost stopped getting surprised by the “it’s such a small world” exclamation that follows the discovery of these common links. As when Aanchal emailed me after one of the earlier pieces, lamenting the lack of interest that townie Mumbaiites showed in her dance class in Sion, and after a couple of email exchanges, we figured out that she lived just four buildings away and that her niece and my kids were friends at the nearby playground. Or when Ravi emailed me and it turned out that he was Sai’s nephew, Sai being the owner of the Air-Conditioned Udipi, which we frequent almost every other Sunday. One of the best stories I heard however, was from my friend’s brother, who was traveling through a remote part of Guadalajara in Mexico and stopped off at a shop where Hindi songs were playing and found the owner to be the brother of the same guy who owned the dhaba in Koliwada, where he used to go to eat fish fry in his younger days.

Sometime back, Hemang emailed me, probably from a cell-phone “evrywhere i see der r kacchis only..people in matunga r like chain ..where evryone knows each other ..which is not visible in oder parts of Bombay”. I guess he was just trying to point out why Matunga is a great village to live in.

“Six Degrees of Separation” is a theory that was first written about in the 1920s. In the 1950s, a couple of scholars proved that a connection can be found between any two people in the world, in just six steps. I guess they didn’t know about Matunga and Matungaeans, where everyone seems to know everyone, and if they don’t, they know someone who does. Making it just two degrees of separation…wherever in the world we Matungaeans may be.