This reminded me of my chance encounter around this time last year.

I ran into Param and Shruti at the place I was stay­ing in Paris (they had just returned from some­where and were booked into the same place) and we crossed paths. Shruti, I’d met once once before, but Param I only knew vir­tu­ally! It was even fun­nier because we’d been try­ing to set up a meet­ing in Ban­ga­lore and never quite succeeded.

That chance encounter led to a lovely evening spent on a Paris road­side drink­ing wine, eat­ing French food and also meet­ing another famil­iar face, Mahesh, who was study­ing there.

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This hap­pened on Sat­ur­day morn­ing. My car had gone for ser­vic­ing so I was cross­ing the road, to take a rick for an appoint­ment with the den­tist. As luck would have it, a few ricks rejected me. Sud­denly, a bike stopped right in front of me and a guy says, “Anita!” with a rather expec­tant look.

I look a lit­tle blankly, since he was also wear­ing a hel­met. And I have a hard time some­times rec­og­niz­ing peo­ple with­out their hel­mets, so this made it tougher. I def­i­nitely hadn’t seen the guy before, but he seemed vaguely famil­iar and he seemed really con­fi­dent that he knew me!

“It’s me, Divs!”

For a moment I was totally lost for words! I mean what are the chances of run­ning into Divs in the mid­dle of BTM, while cross­ing the road? If I had crossed that road a few min­utes ear­lier, we would have missed each other com­pletely. But there we were!

But com­ing back to Divs — he’s been a fre­quent com­menter on my blog for a while now. Prob­a­bly over a year or so. And he’s been writ­ing to me now and then. Just a few days ago, he wrote this really sweet post about how he was inspired to start blogging.

And sud­denly, there is he is : the very same guy.

So that was my chance encounter that left me smil­ing for the rest of the day. Isn’t that what they’re all about? And they leave you with a totally over­whelmed feel­ing. Strange really, how people’s paths cross. And maybe not so strange, after all :)

Any­way, this one is for Divs, one of my long­time blog read­ers and now a blog­ger him­self — another chance encounter I will remem­ber for a long, long time!