Illumination. Rumination.

Was it just a coincidence that I randomly bumped into Kartik on the streets of Sommerville a few weeks ago? Was it a coincidence that I bumped into him again, near MIT last week? Was it a coincidence that after we'd hung out and talked, the film we decided to go see together was Everything is Illuminated? If everything is indeed illuminated in the light of the past, perhaps these random and frequent bumpings into a charecter from my past were trying to get a message across to me, especially at this point in my life - a moment of transition. But what was the message? Was it that with time, and distance, and a sense of humour (and some kickass music!) even the saddest moments in history can become something that are ulitimately life-affirming? That sometimes one effaces one's past in order to continue to live with it in the present, but to truly learn from it, one has to embrace it, so that it may not exactly let go of you, but just stop holding you in a vice like grip every time you lean towards it? Or was it simply that however hard you may wish otherwise, there is really only one way in which you can live your life. Understand. Accept. Move on. I know that the film had its problems - especially when compared to the book - which I haven't read yet, but plan to soon. There have been several critics who have accused it of being too flimsy, of having too much whimsy, of disrespecting the bleakness that is at the heart of the book's subject matter, and this may well be so. But for Kartik and me, and we finally spoke about our bitterness at both our Freshlimesoda experiences, of our friendship that unravelled as mysteriously as it had begun, of random moments of connection such as the one we were having then... laughing together at the antics of the family dog Sammy Davis Junior (as central a charecter in the film as the other 3 humans), it was surreally redemptive.