"This we know, all things are connected"*

Most people are aware of the concept of six degrees of separation -- that you can connect yourself to any person in the world through six people. . . as in you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows that person. Yup, I think that's six people.

Now, thanks to Facebook and other social networking sites, there are even fewer connections between each of us. Or I guess the connections might be the same but these sites allow us an easier way to discover them. And yet, when we do find these strange connections, it's mind-boggling!

Case in point:

Last week, someone, a complete, total, random stranger -- let's call her Hakusakana -- added me as a friend on Facebook. I saw that she knew one person on my friends list, a professor at the J-school -- Srisri (who knows the most random people, particularly South Asians, in such random ways that I've ceased to be amazed by his connections). I also gathered that she was a Sri Lankan who was in Japan. So figuring that she was not some person who was randomly adding friends, I accepted her request. A couple of days later, I got an email from her, saying, in essence, "I didn't know there were Tamils in Japan. Are you in Tokyo? Do you want to meet for coffee?"

I assumed from her email that she was an ethnic Tamil, but found out later that she was Singhalese. In any case, I figured, "Why not?" and we decided on a time and place. We met up and she told me that she was visiting Japan for a couple of months. I asked her how she knew Srisri and she told me that someone had put her in touch with him a few months ago when she was in Europe. First semi-random connection established (semi-random, because I guess I actually met her through him, although her connection to him was pretty random in itself).

As we talked, I mentioned that I'd lived in Minnesota. "Oh, you lived in Minnesota! Do you know these two girls. . .?" she started. Even before she finished her sentence, I knew whom she was talking about. I'd met Mindh and Deep (the former a Singhalese painter, the latter a Tamil dancer) through some acquaintances who were alums of my college. The two run an organization that hosts performances by artists in diaspora, and I had wondered, because of Hakusakana's interest in art and in Sri Lanka (her profile made both pretty clear) if she somehow did know them -- the Sri Lankan art world is tiny indeed. So while amazed at the second random connection, I was not entirely surprised by it.

As we chatted about her experiences, I remembered that she had contacted someone else on my list of Facebook friends. I knew him, Yip, also Sri Lankan Tamil, because he went to my high school (in India) several years before I did, and my parents knew his. But I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how she would know him.

"Oh," she said. "My husband went to school with him." Then she stopped and looked at me. "Wait! You went to school with Yip. That means you went to school with my husband!"

We stared at each other in shock. How does a random stranger turn out to be the wife of someone you went to school with, albeit a few years older? She seemed a bit worried at first about this, uncertain about whether I actually knew him, and if so, how well I did, and if so, if we'd been on good terms. I, on the other hand, was pretty sure that I didn't know him personally but that I would recognize his name. At first she wouldn't tell me his name, and, though I was dying to know, I didn't push her. After a while though, she relented. And I found that I actually did recall his and his brother's names and even vaguely remembered what they looked like. (When I got home later, I called Nev and asked him if he remembered them. After thinking for a bit, he said "Oh yeah yeah yeah! His brother was a goalie on the soccer team!")

As I returned home, I pondered the past few hours. I was struck by Hakusakana's pretty crazy experiences over the past few years but also by the strange ways in which we were connected. How do you meet a person whose path would normally never cross yours (different backgrounds, grown up and living in different parts of the world) with the only obvious thing in common being tenous ties, on both sides, to one little island on the other side of the world. . . and then find several people whom we both knew in so many weird ways?

I guess the world is not as lonely a place as it sometimes seems!

*a quote attributed to Chief Seattle, patriarchof the Suquamish Indians.