Comfort in discomfort?

Most of the Indian diaspora in the US has been subjected to movies about us. These movies present a bunch of situations, most of them rather inanely, in the hope that they resonate with our experiences and thus gain our patronage, so to say. The question of course is whether Ms Rai's populist "Art imitates life" observation really holds here? There might be certain cynics who contend that the above observation is in fact reflexive. But then, that's another topic altogether.

When a person tries to join a culturally different social clique, and I mean here just a group of friends and not the organized mishap that most organized meetings are, he tries to concentrate on the common topics of interest in the beginning. Then, he tries to weave a conversation that inextricably links the present with his past and thus in one masterstroke, highlight the differences as much as the similarities. Most of these attempts fail. Which is when the cynicism betrothed to him as a result of an obvious clash between his western education and Indian values takes over. The wave, which was treading new ground and possibly lashing upon new shores, has now receded. It has receded to its own waters skimming the familiar rocks with predisposed dexterity where the color of the waters paint the skies with the same hue of blue. Henceforth, his discomfort in the presence of the same clique is omnipresent and thus rather perversely becomes the only source for his comfort. Ms Rai never seemed as ridiculous as she did right then.