Just A Droplet

Last week I was talking with Santiago, my friend from Argentina, over dinner… we were talking about football (the real one, not what the Americans play with their hands), Real Madrid match against Manchester United and as he is an Argentinean, we also talked about Barcelona’s resurgence against AC Milan, and Messi of course. He is a Barca fan and I’ve been a Madridista since ’99. A month back or so we discussed about football and he was surprised to know that Barcelona is my second favorite team after Real… he said I was the first person he knew who had the arc rivals as their top two best teams! And I was surprised to know he was all praise about Ronaldo, Messi's nemesis.
 

So as we were having the dinner, accompanied by Michael (Miguel) from Ecuador and Santi’s American girlfriend Melissa, he asked me if I knew Aguero!

“Maradon’s ex-son-in-law?” I replied.

 He gave me that surprised look… and continued… “I am an Argentinean and he knows more about Argentina than me! How do you know that? Do you read all the news?”

I had no answer. I don’t think I do have one… but I do surf net to keep up to date with the headlines… just the first page and if something looks interesting, I go through it.

Earlier same day, I was at my friend Christina's office to discuss about a project that we were doing. While we were talking her friend Julie arrived… so as the conversation went on… we talked about my coin collection… Christina said that her father too have a collection, and at the end she concluded that the Americans do not teach in detail about Geography in schools and the children from other part of the world are way ahead them. Pointing at me she said, “Rabin knows more about US geography than I do. Isn’t that surprising?”

So, I started… when I was in grade VI we were punished if we could not recite the country-capital by heart! I was pathetic then. So during that time I got this bug of collecting coins, being a numismatist… so I started flipping through World Atlas, surprised to know about the countries I have never heard of before… so that just added my interest in the subject even more, unintentionally. Come grade VII, now I could tell the name of the country on the world map which even our teacher couldn’t do… the situation was like, who knows the answer besides Rabin? And later in the school, some of my friends thought I knew more about geography, even more than the subject teacher… that was too much… but I have too many things to know and every time I learn something new, I feel dwarfed… I don’t have even a drop of knowledge about the vast world that lies ahead…